Hypothetical Planet Nine Is Likely to Be Found Soon Using LSS, Astronomer Says

According to one expert, researchers have been looking for the missing planet in our solar system, Planet Nine or Planet X, and astronomers hope to find it soon.

Hypothetical Planet Nine Will Be Found Soon?

A new study used data from Data Release 2 (DR2) from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) to narrow down the potential location of Planet Nine, a.k.a. Planet X. By excluding about 78% of the possible locations determined by earlier research, the team was able to reduce the number of potential places for Planet Nine.

Furthermore, the researchers have presented updated estimates for Planet Nine's Earth-mass size, which is 6.6, and its approximate semimajor axis, measured in astronomical units (AU).

According to Dr. Mike Brown of Caltech, a Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Astronomy, they still work to cover every sky area where they believe Planet Nine could hide. However, they had already covered the largest region using the data from Pan-STARRS. Although they haven't located Planet X yet, they are likely close to finding it because they are left with a smaller area to examine.

"While I would love to say that the most significant result was finding Planet Nine, we didn't," Dr. Brown said. "So instead, it means that we have significantly narrowed the search area. We've now surveyed approximately 80% of the regions where we think Planet Nine might be."

He believes the LSST is the most likely survey to discover Planet Nine. In a year or two, when it becomes live, it will swiftly cover a large portion of the search space and locate Planet Nine, assuming it exists.

The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), for short, is an astronomy program aimed at studying the southern sky at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is now undergoing construction.

Along with deep space research, the goals of LSST include identifying minor planetary bodies and near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in our solar system. These include looking into the characteristics of dark energy and matter and the Milky Way Galaxy's evolution.

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What Is Planet Nine or Plant X?

Planet X a.k.a Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet. Caltech experts have discovered mathematical evidence pointing to the possibility of a "Planet X" somewhere in the solar system.

This fictitious planet, around the size of Neptune, circles our Sun in a very lengthy orbit that extends well beyond Pluto. The object, which the researchers have dubbed "Planet Nine," may be roughly ten times as massive as Earth and orbit the Sun on average 20 times further away than Neptune. An orbit around the Sun could take 10,000-20,000 Earth years to complete.

The announcement does not imply that our solar system has a new planet. No direct observations of the object known as "Planet 9" have been made; hence, the existence of this far-off world is still only theoretical.

The peculiar trajectories of a few smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, a far-off region of ice debris that stretches far beyond Neptune's orbit, may be explained by the mathematical prediction of a planet. Currently, astronomers are looking for the predicted planet.

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