Our solar system has eight planets, plus poor Pluto demoted in 2006, but what if there were more planets?
It turned out that it might be. Astronomers have calculated that there is a 7 percent chance that Earth has another neighbor hidden in the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a spherical region of ice and rock tens of thousands of times farther from the Sun than we are.
“It’s perfectly plausible that our solar system has captured such an Oort cloud planet,” says study co-author Nathan Kybe, an astronomer at the Institute for Planetary Sciences.
Such hidden worlds, he says, “are the kind of planets that have undoubtedly exist but have received relatively little attention so far.”
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, which can sometimes destabilize each other.
This could result in planets being ejected from the solar system entirely or to the outer edge of the solar system where the Oort cloud resides.
“The surviving planets have eccentric orbits and are like scars from a violent past,” said lead author Sean Raymond, a researcher at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Bordeaux.
This means that unlike Earth’s orbit around the Sun in a near-perfect circle, planets in the Oort Cloud 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 existed in our Oort cloud, it’s likely that we haven’t discovered it yet,” said a Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronomy researcher who wasn’t involved in the study. says Malena Rice.
“Surprisingly, sometimes it’s easier to find a planet hundreds of light years away than it is in our backyard.”
Time to get out the telescope.
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