Posted on by Evan Gough

Astronomers Have Found Planet 9… in Another Solar System

This 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

Even with all we’ve learned about our own Solar System, especially in the last couple of decades, researchers still face many unanswered questions. One of those questions regards the so-called Planet Nine. The Planet Nine hypothesis states that there’s a massive planet in our Solar System orbiting at a great distance from the Sun.

Nobody’s ever observed the hypothesized planet; the evidence for it lies in a cluster of bodies that orbit the Sun 250 times further out than Earth does. These objects are called e-TNOs, for extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects. According to the hypothesis, Planet Nine’s gravity is responsible for the unusual clustered orbits of these e-TNOs.

Now astronomers have found a distant solar system with its own Planet Nine, and that discovery is breathing new life into the hypothesis.

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