Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, two researches from the California Institute of Technology, published a paper in “The Astronomical Journal” on Jan. 20 claiming to have found evidence that a ninth planet may be in the solar system, after all.

According to Batygin and Brown, the planet would be 10 times the mass of the Earth, making it just smaller than Neptune, and it would be a gas giant, just like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Its orbit would be highly elliptical, taking between 10,000 and 20,000 years to orbit the sun.

This puts its perihelion, or closest approach to the sun, between 200 and 300 astronomical units (20 billion miles). One AU represents the distance from the sun to the Earth, which is approximately 93 million miles. And its aphelion, or farthest distance from the sun, would be between 600 to 1,200 AU (100 billion miles) away — 25 times farther away than Pluto ever gets.

In their paper, entitled “Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System,” Batygin and Brown claim that this possible planet, nicknamed “Planet Nine” or “Planet X,” could be the key to understanding the mysterious behavior of the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a region of space beyond Neptune, which is the eighth and last planet currently known in the solar system. This region contains comets, asteroids, icy objects, and even four known dwarf planets, including Pluto, which was demoted to dwarf status in 2006.

Michael E. Brown, the same researcher who believes there may be a ninth planet, was an immense contributor to Pluto’s demotion. Also in 2006, NASA launched the New Horizons mission intended to study Pluto and other bodies in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons reached Pluto after nine years, in July 2015.

Six Kuiper Belt objects, known as KBOs, piqued the attention of Batygin and Brown. The orbits of these KBOs are clustered, highly elliptical, all point in the same direction in space, and are all tilted 30-degrees downward relative to the plane of the known eight planets’ orbits. The probability that this would happen randomly is about .007 percent.

During computer simulations to find out how these orbits could be caused, Batygin and Brown tried putting in a massive planet with an anti-aligned orbit. This means that the planet’s perihelion (closest approach to the sun) would be 180 degrees across from the eight known planets’ perihelions.

During this simulation, the KBOs took on the alignment that they are currently in, giving strong evidence that “Planet Nine” may be in our solar system. It also helped to explain the irregular orbit of Sedna, another dwarf planet near Neptune, which lies beyond the Kuiper Belt.

Both Brown and Batygin have admitted how skeptical they were at first, but more evidence kept showing up that led them to believe in their planet theory.

Most of the scientific world has been excited by this finding, but at the same time, it has received both skepticism and criticism, including targeting Brown for his demotion of Pluto just to find himself a new planet.

Matt Leone, an Earth Science teacher at LHS, is still very calm about the discovery. “I’m always skeptical. That’s the nature of the game… Don’t get me wrong, I love new discoveries. But I’m not gonna jump up and down until they find it,” he said.

“A while back, they thought they found a particle that traveled faster than the speed of light, and everybody went ballistic. Everybody except the scientific world. They’re like, ‘No, you found a subatomic particle that traveled at an anomalous speed, we don’t know what the heck happened. Turned out it was no big deal; they misread the distance.”

Leone’s example encapsulates how scientists have to reign in news outlets when they do exciting research.

“Planet Nine” has not been discovered. However, Neptune was found using mathematics, so there is hope that this planet may be physically found in the near future.