Did Our Solar System Lose a Planet?
upstart writes:
A giant planet may have "escaped" from our solar system, study finds:
Although Pluto lost its status as "Planet Nine" when it was downgraded to dwarf planet, there is ample evidence that our solar system either had or currently has a large planet far beyond Pluto that may one day claim Pluto's former mantle and become the rightful ninth planet. Unusually regular orbital patterns observed in the Kuiper belt hint that some celestial body more massive than Pluto lurks beyond the distant band of icy debris at the edge of the solar system where Pluto, Eris and other dwarf planets live.
The hypothetical existence of a distant Planet Nine or "Planet X" remains contentious, but evidence continues to mount in its favor. Certainly, it would not be the first time a hypothetical planet was found. Neptune was the first planet found through studying orbits of other bodies in the solar system; intriguingly, its location was discovered with predictions derived from pen-and-paper calculations about telescope observations.
Inadvertently, a recent astronomy paper in Nature found a high likelihood that a gas giant, akin to those in the outer solar system, may have been rapidly ejected from its orbit around the sun early in the evolution of a solar system. The existence of a "lost" Planet Nine early in the formation of the solar system's history would go far in explaining a lot of how and why the solar system looks as it does today.
Journal Reference:Liu, B., Raymond, S.N. & Jacobson, S.A. Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk. Nature 604, 643-646 (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04535-1
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