If Planet 9 does exist, it’s probably a very cold gas giant like Neptune, rather than a rocky planet like Earth.
Astronomer Michael Brown led the campaign that controversially demoted Pluto in 2006 from the ninth planet of our solar system into just one of its many dwarf planets. Now, he hopes to fill the gap he created with what he predicts will be the discovery of a “Planet 9” — a planet many times the size of Earth that might orbit the sun far beyond Neptune.
Some astronomers think the undiscovered Planet Nine causes the unusual orbits in the outer solar system of the icy asteroids and cometary cores known as Kuiper Belt Objects. One of the results of the new study is that the orbit of Planet 9 is closer to the sun than what the 2016 study proposed, with an elongated orbit only about 380 times the distance between Earth and the sun at its closest, instead of more than 400 times that distance.
It would be smaller, however — Neptune is more than 17 times the mass of Earth. But roughly six to 10 times Earth’s mass is the most common size of gas giants seen by astronomers elsewhere in our galaxy, although there are none — so far — in our solar system, Brown said.
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