[imagesource: stock.adobe.com]

The search for Planet Nine, a hypothesised ninth planet in our Solar System, is on.

The planet above is just an artist’s depiction of what it might look like as the fabled space object has not yet been spotted.

However, possible evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system seems more likely than ever according to a British astronomer who relooked at some data gathered in 1983.

Michael Rowan-Robinson, a professor of astrophysics at Imperial College London, found that data gathered by an early space telescope showed a possible candidate for the ninth planet theory.

He was also one of the leading astronomers trying to decide if Pluto should still be considered a planet during the 2006 meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

It was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet that same year, and naturally, there was widespread outrage on behalf of the demoted planet.

Rowan-Robinson seems on track to potentially upend the Solar System as we know it yet again.

Although the candidate for the ninth planet has not been properly detected yet, his evidence has narrowed down the area of the sky in which to look for this distant and mysterious planet quite substantially, reported Inverse:

Image: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Rowan-Robinson put all his findings down in a scientific paper recently, but the theories about its existence have been floating around the science community for some time:

The talk of Planet Nine first emerged in January 2015 when a duo of astronomers from the California Institute for Technology (Caltech) suggested that a Neptune-sized planet orbits our Sun in a highly elongated orbit that lies far beyond Pluto.

They based their claim on mathematical modeling and computer simulations and not observation. The duo suggests that a ninth planet is responsible for the gravitational effect on a group of icy objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune in the Kuiper Belt. Those small objects have elongated orbits with similar characteristics, as if caused by one massive object.

When the conversation around Planet Nine propped up again, Rowan-Robinson took it upon himself to look through the IRAS data in search of this planet:

“So I decided to hunt through these catalogs looking for all sources that were not identified with galaxies or other objects such as stars.”

“I spent thousands of hours searching through these objects [that satisfy the pattern that would be expected of a moving object], and gradually I eliminated almost all the possibilities,” Rowan-Robinson says.

…”and finally, I was left with one case which I couldn’t quite eliminate.”

Three observations were of interest as a potential candidate for Planet Nine out of around 250 000 detectable objects.

Apparently, these options were also in line with what appeared moving across the sky three separate times in 1983.

Meanwhile, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, who was behind the 2015 Planet Nine model, said he found something that could be a separate discovery on the hunt for actual Planet Nine:

Fun paper out today on the search for Planet Nine using old IRAS data. Nothing too compelling, but there is one candidate that Rowan-Robinson mentions, before mostly dismissing it as unlikely-to-be real. Still, if is fun to ponder: what if it IS real?https://t.co/daVnL4cZ61

— Mike Brown (@plutokiller) November 9, 2021

He added that:

“If someone discovers a planet beyond Neptune inconsistent with our predictions WE DID NOT PREDICT IT AND IT IS AN UTTERLY UNRELATED (and quite awesome) DISCOVERY,” he writes.

Rowan-Robinson is nearing the end of his career, which means the detection of Planet Nine is there for the taking.

[source:inverse]