Homing In On Planet Nine

We're taking the first steps in narrowing down where the hypothetical may be hiding away.

- Lewis Dartnell

The argument that there may be an undiscovered planet lurking far in the outer Solar System has been gathering momentum of late. This mysterious world has been dubbed Planet Nine, and several different studies have recently rallied statistical evidence that indicates its existence. Most notably, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown claimed last year that clustering of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) is caused by the gravitational nudging of an unseen but massive outer planet. Batygin and Brown estimated that this potential super-Earth world would follow a highly eccentric orbit with a semi-major axis of around 700 AU; around 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.