Evidence for 'Planet Nine' Lurking on the Fringes of the Solar System is Building
upstart writes:
A huge unknown lurks in the far reaches of our Solar System - something massive enough to pull distant space rocks into extraordinarily long, thin loops around the Sun.
At least, this is what US astronomer Michael Brown believes.
In 2016, he and a colleague at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) proposed something almost unfathomable: a huge planet, up to 10 times heftier than Earth, way out on the edge of our Solar System.
[...] Those that are convinced Planet Nine is out there are waiting for the new Vera Rubin Observatory to come online in Chile early next year.
The telescope has an 8.4-metre mirror, which makes it the largest camera ever built for astronomy.
"It's going to be doing something called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is a massive survey - taking images of the sky every single night," Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist Sara Webb says.
[...] "If Vera Rubin doesn't find it by reflected sunlight, the next best thing is to find it not as reflected sunlight, but by using radio telescopes," he says.
"They're not designed to look at little planets; they're designed to look at the whole sky at once. It'll take a while for the telescopes to be able to see that this planet has moved from one place to the other, so it'll be a couple of years of those surveys before we know it's there.
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