The ninth planet

As many of you probably know, Pluto has been declared a dwarf planet. This was declared by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in August of 2006. The reason for this is because other celestial bodies of similar size have been found in farther reaches than Pluto's orbit. This made the IAU decide that instead of continually adding new official planets to our solar system, we would have a subclass of dwarf planets instead.

Now, this brings me to the point of this blog post. In 2014, researchers stumbled upon this find by accident. They were viewing different dwarf planets farther out than Pluto's orbit and discovered something odd. Each orbit had a strange wobble to it that couldn't be explained. The probability that all of the orbits are doing this naturally without any other mass affecting it is about .007. This is a very small probability. So what scientists and researchers have determined, is there must be a large planet out there affecting the dwarf planets' orbits. This planet would be roughly ten times the mass of earth or about three times larger in overall size. Now before we get too excited about this discovery, it is still just a speculation since it hasn't been viewed directly. However, the evidence is definitely pointing towards this being a true ninth planet in our solar system even though it's way, way out there. The estimation is that this super-earth or super-neptune, depending on it's physical makeup, takes 20,000 years to orbit the sun. It also never gets closer than 300 to 600 astronomical units (distance between the sun and earth) to the sun. This is a massive orbit considering the earth only takes one year to do a full revolution around the sun. I'm hoping to hear more on this discovery and a confirmation that we do indeed have a true ninth planet lurking way out in our solar system.