Astronomers have narrowed down the location of the most mysterious planet in the Solar System

Planet 9 is a hypothetical planet the size of Neptune, which, if it existed, would orbit our Sun in a very long orbit farther than Pluto. In the most recent search for this mysterious object, Belyakov, at the University of Pennsylvania's department of physics and astronomy, and his team ruled out a part of the sky where the planet could not exist, and this has made helps improve the odds of finding Planet 9.

Scientists believe that there is a 9th planet in our Solar System, it is 10 times the size of Earth. The position of this planet is still not confirmed but it is certain that it exists thanks to its gravitational effect on other objects.

In January 2015, a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) stumbled upon a potentially groundbreaking discovery. The alignments of some of the most distant planets in our Solar System all appear to have the same perihelion, or closest point to the Sun. This suggests that there may be a giant planet that had to drag them into these orbits, and throw them hundreds of times the distance between the Sun and Earth.

These give us hints of the existence of a planet roughly the same size as Neptune, and that it may be located so far away that we have never detected it,

Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown have named it Planet 9. This hypothetical planet could have a mass 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the Sun than the star. Neptune, the eighth and most distant planet known from the Sun. According to NASA, Planet 9 could take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to complete one orbit around the Sun.

Although the scientific community is still debating whether Planet 9 exists or not, most agree that we need to do the work to find this object whether it is a planet in the Solar System. The sun or a strange giant object lurks in the distance.

Planet 9 is 10 times more massive than Earth and moves along an elongated orbit at a distance 400 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Planet 9's orbit is also probably 15 to 25 degrees off from the main orbital plane of the Solar System, where the rest of the planets move.

For the latest search efforts, the team of scientists behind the new study turned to a survey designed to uncover another cosmic mystery: dark energy.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies to reveal the nature of dark energy.

"The dark energy survey makes it possible to see objects 100 times fainter than other surveys," says Belyakov. So it gives us a much deeper coverage. and we were able to eliminate nearly all of the potential candidates that we had previously submitted."

The team created 100,000 simulated objects that are likely to be Planet 9 based on hypothetical models of its possible mass and distance. They then looked at the data collected by DES to see how many of these 100,000 objects it would capture.

That way, they were able to eliminate about 5% of the locations in the sky covered by DES where these potential objects were not found. Although it currently exists as a putative ninth planet, the discovery of a new addition to the Solar System will dramatically change scientists' understanding of how it formed. .

The Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago, but scientists are still uncertain about the details of each planet's formation and whether our star system is unique in the universe.

Belyakov said: "The existence of Planet 9, if confirmed, will greatly change our perception of how regions outside the Solar System work. When we confirm its existence. of Planet 9, scientists can make much more accurate predictions about the gravitational model of the Solar System."

The idea of ​​the existence of this new planet was proposed in 2014-2015, and it quickly became popular among astronomers. This speculation is based on samples of objects in an outer ring of debris known as the "Kuiper Belt". It has been observed that the objects here are clumped together in a manner similar to the presence of gravity from some large object. Since this discovery, astronomers have tried to find a lot of evidence to support the existence of the 9th planet in the Solar System. However, what keeps us from saying for sure that this planet completely exists is our limited understanding of the Kuiper Belt.