Written by: Narve Shahukhal - 30014, Grade VI
Posted on: 21 November, 2023
Planet X is a hypothetical celestial body. In January 2015, Caltech astronomers Konstantin and Mike Brown announced new research providing evidence of a giant planet exhibiting unusual movement in the outer solar system. However, prior to this discovery, they had identified Pluto, Charon, Eris, and Sedna in our orbit.
The quest for Planet X traces back to 1846, when Percival Lowell initiated the search with his team, aiming to find evidence of the elusive planet. During their exploration, Lowell's team discovered Neptune, and later, Clyde Tombaugh's identification of Pluto in 1930 seemed to support Lowell's hypothesis, leading to Pluto being officially named the ninth planet.
In 1978, it was conclusively determined that Pluto was too small for its gravity to significantly affect the giant planets, prompting a brief search for the tenth planet. However, when Voyager 2 was launched, it revealed that the mass of Pluto differed from Percival Lowell's estimates and raised questions about the presence of undiscovered planets. Subsequent observations led to the identification of several dwarf planets.
A contentious debate ensued, prompting the establishment of criteria to identify planets. In March 2014, observations with the WISE telescope ruled out the possibility of a Saturn-sized object (95 Earth masses) beyond 10,000 AU and a Jupiter-sized (318 Earth masses) or larger object beyond 26,000 AU.
In our solar system, Mercury is at 0.39 AU, Venus at 0.72 AU, Earth at 1.00 AU, Mars at 1.52 AU, Saturn at 9.54 AU, Uranus at 19.22 AU, and Neptune at 30.00 AU. On average, Neptune lies about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometres) away from the Sun, but at their closest approach, they are separated by approximately 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometres). Despite these discoveries, the elusive Planet X has yet to be found.
Reference- Google, Nasa Science
