This is what Planet Nine could look like – if it exists (Picture: Future Publishing via Getty)
Scientists could be on the brink of a major new space discovery.
The search for the elusive Planet Nine – also known as Planet X – has been a focal point for astronomers since 2016.
Now Dr Michael Brown and Dr Konstantin Batygin, astronomers from Caltech, ave ruled out more than three-quarters of the orbit the hypothetical planet would take.
Along with Dr Matthew Holman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, the team used the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) observatory in Hawaii to look at Planet Nine’s orbital pathway at monthly intervals and look for bright objects that moved every month.
So far they have looked at around 78% of the orbit where the planet would likely be.
It’s still not been found – and that’s even if it exists at all.
They are hoping to look at more data from the Subaru Telescope, also in Hawaii, to look at the rest of the orbit and believe they could find it in the next few years.
The trio published their findings to the preprint database arXiv in early February, but the results are still yet to be peer-reviewed.
The researchers first proposed the planet’s existence after other astronomers noticed a series of objects in the Kuiper Belt – a large disk of asteroids and comets beyond the orbit of Neptune – had usual orbits around the sun.
Venus transits the sun (Picture: SDO/NASA via Getty)
Usually, planets can be spotted through the transit method – where when a plane goes past a star we see a dip in light. But, finding planets in our own solar system is more difficult, as only Venus and Mercury transit our host star.
The other planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Uranus were found by astronomers looking up and seeing a moving bright object in the sky.
Neptune was discovered when astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier noticed there was a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus and the way Newtonian physics predicted it to be.
So after analysing the objects that had a weird gravitational pull, the two researchers concluded that only a massive planet could have the gravitational pull to explain the anomalies.
The planet is thought to be around seven times bigger than the Sun, and with an orbit that’s thought to take around 5,000 and 10,000 years to complete.
‘An obvious possibility, of course, is that Planet Nine does not exist,’ said the team.
‘Such an explanation would require new explanations for multiple phenomena observed in the outer Solar System. Until such explanations are available, we continue to regard Planet Nine as the most likely hypothesis.’