The scientist who lead the charge for Pluto's demise as an official planet in our solar system is now on the hunt for its de facto successor, a planet appropriately named "Planet X."
Astronomer Mike Brown and his research partner Konstantin Batygin announced they have collected sufficient evidence to determine the existence of a ninth planet in the outer reaches of our immediate galaxy. According to Batygin and Brown, Planet X is purportedly has 10 times the mass of Earth, is roughly the size of Neptune, and takes a good 15,000 years to complete one full elliptical orbit around the sun.
While the scientists proclaimed that categorically the theorized ninth planet is within the parameters of our solar system, it's still a bit of a trip.
"We have found evidence that there's a giant planet in the outer solar system," Brown told Popular Science in an interview. "By 'giant' we mean the size of Neptune, and when we say 'outer solar system' we mean 10 to 20 times farther away than Pluto."
The astronomers deduced the existence of Planet X through a mixture of educated estimation and their observation of a particular cluster comprised of six celestial objects — a spatial arrangement that they believe can only be caused by a planetary gravitational pull.
NASA disagrees. As of March 2014, the federal agency's official stance is that while there might be celestial entities that have not yet been discovered, Planet X is a pipe dream and the cluster might be a coincidence.
"If you ever say, 'We think we have found evidence for Planet X,' the first reaction of any astronomer is, 'Oh, you're one of those crazy people.' And that's a perfectly reasonable reaction," added Brown, who conversley holds that there is a 0.007 percent chance the cluster formation could be by coincidence. "There's been so much craziness over these things over the past century that there's no reason to believe that somebody is going to come along who's not crazy and say the same thing. Except, I think we're right this time rather than crazy."
Learn more about Planet X in the video below.
Source: Popular Science
