Our solar system has eight planets, including poor Pluto, which was demoted in 2006, but what if there were more planets?
It turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated that there is a 7 percent chance that Earth has another neighbor hidden inside the Oort cloud. The Oort Cloud is a spherical region of ice and rock that is tens of thousands of times farther from the Sun than we are.
“It’s entirely plausible that our solar system could have captured an Oort cloud planet like this,” says study co-author Nathan Kaibb, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. .
Such hidden worlds are “a class of planets that definitely exist, but have received relatively little attention so far,” he said.
If a planet is hidden in the Oort Cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant.
Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are usually born as twins. However, they have their own strong gravitational pull, and in some cases they destabilize each other.
If that happens, the planet could be ejected from the solar system entirely or exiled to the outer reaches of the solar system, where the Oort cloud resides.
“The surviving planets have eccentric orbits, like scars from a violent past,” said lead author Sean Raymond, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Bordeaux.
This means that unlike Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is a nearly perfect circle, Oort cloud planets may have fairly elongated orbits.
The problem is that when things are far away, they are much harder to find. “It would be very difficult to detect,” Raymond added.
“If a Neptune-sized planet exists in our Oort cloud, we likely haven’t discovered it yet,” said a Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronomer who was not involved in the study. says Malena Rice.
“Surprisingly, it may be easier to find a planet hundreds of light years away than one in our backyard.”
Time to get out the telescope.
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