On January 20th 2016, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced that they have found evidence of a possible ninth planet in our solar system. The discovery was made by Mike Brown, the man responsible for Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet, and Konstantine Batygin. The new planet is beyond the orbit of Pluto in what is known as the Kuiper Belt, a region of space filled with icy objects at the farthest reaches of our solar system.
While some researchers are calling the new planet, Planet X, Brown and Batygin are calling it Planet Nine, and say that they never intended to discover a new planet. In fact, neither have observed the planet directly. Brown and Batygin base their assertion of a ninth planet on the observation of the motion of several other objects that were discovered in the Kuiper Belt in 2014. The two astonomers noticed that something was effecting the orbits of at least five of them.
Sedna, a dwarf planet which was also discovered by Brown and another dwarf planet nicknamed Biden as well as several smaller Kuiper Belt objects, were observed to be clustering in their orbits. Brown and Batygin theorized that perhaps the gravity of a much larger object, like a planet, had be the cause of this. They also noticed that the orbits of Sedna and Biden didn't allow them to come in close to the solar system.
Brown and Batygin's computer simulations predicted that only a very large planet could account for the perturbation of the orbits of Sedna and Biden and some of the other small Kuiper belt objects. The predictions gave the size of the planet as having 10 times the mass of the Earth and an orbit that is 20 times further from the sun then Neptune. Though Planet Nine has yet to be seen, the search using terrestrial telescopes is already under way.
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