Astronomers reveal a 'treasure map' to find the mysterious Planet 9 of the solar system

By Tom Metcalfe - NBC News

Astronomer Michael

Brown led the 2006 campaign that controversially demoted Pluto from being the ninth planet in our solar system to just one of its many dwarf planets

.

Now, Brown hopes to fill the void he created with what he predicts will be the discovery of Planet 9,

 larger (by many times) than Earth, and which could orbit the sun well beyond Neptune.

"It was definitely not the intention," said Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and author of the memoir

How I Killed Pluto and Why He Deserved It.

A study published online in August by Brown and his colleague at Caltech, astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin, reexamines the evidence for a proposal they first suggested in 2016: that

the hypothetical Planet 9 could explain the anomalies observed by astronomers in the system. outer solar

, especially the unusual grouping of icy asteroids and cometary nuclei called Kuiper Belt objects.

Planet 9 would be much brighter and smaller than Earth.

Capture via NBC News

The study has been accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal

, according to the National Geographic magazine.

Despite years of searching, Planet 9 has never been seen

.

For this reason some astronomers have suggested that it does not exist and that the grouping of objects observed by Brown and Batygin is the result of an "observation bias", because

less than a dozen objects have been seen and their grouping could be one statistical fluke that would not be seen among the hundreds that are believed to exist.

For their latest study, however, Brown and Batygin have added several recent observations of objects and calculated that the clustering is almost real.

In fact, they found that there is only a 0.4% chance that it is a fluke.

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This suggests that Planet 9 is almost certainly there.

The new study includes a treasure map of its supposed orbit that tells astronomers the best places in the sky to search for it.

Brown is working with data from several astronomical surveys in hopes of catching the first glimpse of Planet 9. If that search is unsuccessful,

he hopes it can be seen in data from a new large telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory in the mountains. from northern Chile, which is scheduled to start operating at full capacity in 2023.

One of the results of the new study is that the orbit of Planet 9 is closer to the sun than the 2016 study proposed, with an elongated orbit only about 380 times the distance between Earth and the sun at its closest point. , instead of more than 400 times that distance.

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The closer orbit would make Planet 9 much brighter and much easier to see

, Brown said, although

his new calculations suggest it is also slightly smaller - about six times the mass of Earth

, instead of up to 20. times bigger.

"By virtue of its closeness, even if it's a little less massive, it

's a little brighter than we originally envisioned

," he said, "so I'm excited because this is going to help us find it much more quickly."

If Planet 9 exists, it is probably a very cold gas giant like Neptune, rather than a rocky planet like Earth.

However, it would be smaller: Neptune is more than 17 times the mass of Earth.

But the most common size of gas giants observed by astronomers elsewhere in our galaxy is between six and ten times the mass of Earth, although there are none - as of now - in our solar system, Brown said.

Some astronomers believe that the yet to be discovered Planet 9 is the cause of the unusual orbits in the outer solar system.

Capture via NBC News

Although

Planet 9 could have formed at such a great distance from the disk of gas that surrounded the early sun

, it seems likely that it formed at the same distance from the sun as Uranus and Neptune, but was thrown into the outer reaches of the solar system by the Saturn's strong gravity, Brown added.

He also dismissed the suggestion made by astronomers last year that

Planet 9 could actually be a black hole orbiting the sun.

"It was almost a joke when they wrote that article," he said, "it's funny and cute, but there's really no reason to speculate that it could be a black hole."

While Brown and his colleagues renew their search for Planet 9 with a better idea of ​​where to look,

other astronomers are still skeptical that it exists

.

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Physicist Kevin Napier, a graduate student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, led a study published earlier this year that

suggested that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt was a statistical illusion.

Napier said in an email that the extremely small number of object orbits used as proof of Planet 9's existence - barely 11 are known - is not convincing.

"The statistical power that can be extracted from a dozen data points is limited," he said.

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This means that the existence of Planet 9 can only be conjectured until more observations of the outer solar system are made

.

"Perhaps we will discover a new planet lurking in the dark, or perhaps our discoveries will make any evidence of clustering completely disappear," he said, "

until then, we will continue to search the sky for new and interesting rocks, and in doing so, we will focus better understanding of our solar system

. "