Two years ago, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) found evidence to suggest that a mysterious planet larger than Earth could be hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the furthest reaches of the Solar System.
While the researchers didn’t directly observe the hypothetical ninth planet—otherwise known as Planet Nine—they did predict its existence based on the strange orbits of a handful of so-called Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)—distant, icy worlds located beyond the orbit of Neptune. These TNOs are clustered together in a way that is extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance, indicating the presence of a planet-sized object that is influencing their orbits through its gravitional pull, the theory goes.
Since this discovery, scientists around the world have scrambled to investigate the predictions, but Planet Nine has remained elusive. Now, an international team of researchers has reported the discovery of another distant world with an extraordinary orbit—referred to as 2015 BP519—which, they say, bolsters the case for the ninth planet.
In a new paper, published on the online preprint server arXiv.org, the team described how it uncovered the space object in 2014 using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES)—an international, collaborative effort to map a vast region of the skies and reveal the nature of the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, known as dark energy.
http://www.newsweek.com/planet-nine-evidence-grows-after-scientists-find-distant-object-extraordinary-929060
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