Planet 10 Times Bigger Than Earth May Hide in Our Solar System

0:00While we may think of ourselves as advanced after catching a glimpse of the eight planets of our solar system and their 200 moons, we really have little idea of what's out there. So much so that there's speculation that there might be one more planet in our solar system. Scientists call it Planet X or Planet 9. This undiscovered world could be hidden way out past Neptune. Droids and dwarf planets in this area have weirdly unexplained altered orbits, and Planet X may be the reason. Tales of this mysterious planet began over a hundred years ago with a man called Percival Lowell. Lowell had a great love of space, and aside from having an impressive mustache, he was also super rich. Ooh, that lucky guy. He used his riches to build an observatory in Arizona. He then dedicated it to study the odd motions of Uranus and Neptune. Their gravitational pulls are slower than those of all the other planets in our solar system,

1:03almost as if there is a giant hidden object pulling them off course. In 1906, Lowell theorized that there could be another planet out beyond Neptune. It probably caused those strange cosmic happenings. The man called this potential space body Planet X. In 1930, Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombal at Lowell's very own observatory. It finally looked like people had an explanation for the weird orbital patterns. Lowell's team was on cloud 9 after the discovery, but their celebrations were short lived. Soon, they found out that Pluto was way too small to be having that much of an effect on the surrounding planets, and it was also too far away from them, so it was back to the drawing board. Planet X, if it exists, is 10 times the size of Earth and 4 times its radius. It would take at least 10,000 years for the planet to orbit the Sun, and it would sit over 200 times further out than our home planet.

2:07That's 600 astronomical units from the center of the solar system. FYI, an astronomical unit equals the distance between the Earth and the Sun. While that sounds super far away, it's actually not. The distance between space bodies is usually measured in light years, and an astronomical unit is a much smaller unit of measurement. For context, the most distant thing detected from Earth is the galaxy GNZ-11, cute name, huh? It sits as staggering 32 billion light years away. And so, our telescopes can still spot it. And just one light year is the same as 63,241 astronomical units. Woo! So, if our tech can detect a galaxy that's so far away, how have we not been able to uncover planet X? Well, it's probably down to the fact that it might not even exist. The theory of planet X was pretty much debunked back in 1989.

3:10It was discovered that the mysterious gravitational pulls of Neptune have been a red herring all along. Scientists had massively misjudged just how big Neptune actually was. Voyager 2 visited the planet and discovered its actual size. This new info explained the odd gravitational pulls, meaning they weren't being caused by the so-called planet X. But that's not where our investigation ends, as the hypothetical 9th planet once again popped up around 10 years ago. While the evidence behind Lowell's theory was wrong, his belief in planet X may not have been. In 2015, astronomers Michael Brown and Constantin Batigen discovered that there were, in fact, unexplained gravitational forces at play past Neptune. There are satellites that orbit planets perpendicularly, which doesn't happen anywhere else in our solar system. There's also clusters of asteroids that move in very specific ways, so specific that it's

4:11basically impossible that it could be random. Even weirder, there are satellites that travel incompletely opposite direction to the sun, unlike most other things in the solar system. A planetoid, called Sedna, also appears to be being pulled towards something, along with six others, all going in the same direction. When Brown and Batigen aren't just any other stargazers, they're both well-respected scientists at the top of their game. Constantin Batigen has been named in Forbes as one of 30 scientists who are changing the world. And Mike Brown was the man who rebranded Pluto as a dwarf planet. This means that when these guys say something, it's usually pretty legit, and you should probably listen. But the only way we can really prove planet X exists is to actually find it, and this has turned out to be pretty difficult. To locate the planet, we'd need to use a method called Transit Photometry, which is basically where we monitor a whole bunch of stars for a long time, and look out for any dips in

5:13the light they give off. These dips would likely be caused by a planet getting in the way, and ta-da, the existence of planet X could be proved. But for this method to work, Earth, the new planet, and the sun, all have to be perfectly aligned. These circumstances are pretty rare, and if these conditions don't exist, the dip in light won't happen. Plus, this method would only really work with planets that are closer to the sun than our Earth. That's Venus and Mercury. For anything past Earth, this technique is pretty much useless. Another technique we could use is to find the potential planet through a good old-fashioned telescope. But as you can imagine, that's insanely tricky. The furthest object that we've found in our solar system is a planetoid, appropriately named, far far out. But that's only 140 AU away from the sun. That's only like a quarter of the way to planet X. We can only see an object because of its brightness.

6:16The sun is very visible to us because it emits huge amounts of light. And we can see the moon because it reflects the sun's light. Technically, the moon has no right to appear brighter than everything else in the night sky. It only seems brighter because we're closer to it. The farther away an object is, the less bright it appears to us. The major issue with seeing the theoretical planet X is that all objects in our solar system get their light from the sun. They reflect sunlight, and that's why we can see them. Given how far away from the sun planet X might be, it makes it nearly impossible to see. And because of its really dim light, to view it, we would require perfect weather conditions as well as an extremely strong telescope. But brown and badgent have found the perfect one. The Subaru Telescope is located at the top of a dormant volcano in Hawaii. It's huge and is capable of capturing even the weakest light from distant space objects.

7:20The issue that we need to figure out is where to point it. Without knowing where planet X actually is, this basically turns things into a giant guessing game. There are also only around three nights every year when the conditions are clear enough to see the hypothetical planet X. It's difficult, but not impossible. And still, most astronomers have called it a day and agreed that planet X doesn't exist, stating that it's just a common myth. The most widespread explanation for the weird gravitational pulls is that there's a tiny black hole in our solar system, it's pulling the planets toward us. But don't worry, they say it's not big enough to actually munch on a planet. So worth is all good for now. The issue with the black hole theory is that, once again, it's almost impossible for us to track the thing down. While its mass could be as great as that of planet X, the hole itself would be squished down to the size of an orange.

8:23Telescopes wouldn't be of any use. To find it, people would have to look for the gamma rays sent off by objects as they fall into the black hole. Another way we could find it is to release hundreds of tiny spacecraft. They would pass close enough to the hypothetical hole, and when they got pulled toward it, we could probably detect it. But don't count up brown and badagens theory. It's still being documented by NASA. And until we find unmistakable evidence to prove any theories, planet X might still be out there.