So, after a brief interlude involving a legal battle with his widow, Constance Lowell, his observatory kept looking. Just 14 years later, on 18 February , a young astronomer was looking at two photos of star-studded skies, when he noticed a speck amongst them. It was a tiny world. He had found Pluto — for a while considered the elusive planet X. Alas, it was not to be. Soon scientists realised that this could not be what Lowell was looking for — it was not nearly large enough to pull Neptune and Uranus away from their rightful positions.
Pluto was just an accidental interloper, which happened to be in the area. The final blow to planet X came in , when the Voyager 2 spacecraft swept by Neptune and revealed that it's fractionally lighter than anyone had originally thought. With this in mind, eventually a Nasa scientist calculated that the orbits of the outer planets had made sense all along.
Lowell had instigated a search that had had never been needed. But just as the concept of a hidden planet was killed off, the groundwork was laid for its resurrection. In , two astronomers who had "doggedly scanned the heavens in search of dim objects beyond Neptune" for years, according to Nasa, discovered the Kuiper Belt.
This cosmic donut of frozen objects, extending just beyond the orbit of Neptune, is one of the largest features in the solar system. It's so vast, it's thought to contain hundreds of thousands of objects larger than km 62 miles across , as well as up to a trillion comets. Soon scientists realised that Pluto was unlikely to be the only large object in the outer reaches of the solar system — and began to question whether it was actually a planet at all.
It became clear that astronomers needed a new definition. In , the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto's status to a "dwarf planet", along with the newcomers. Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology — Caltech — who led the team that identified Eris, is self-styled as the "man who killed Pluto" to this day. The ninth planet was no more. At the same time, the discovery of these objects uncovered a major new lead in the search for a hidden planet.
It turns out that Sedna is not moving in the way everyone expected — tracing elliptical rings around the Sun, from within the Kuiper Belt. Its orbit is so meandering, it takes 11, years to complete — the last time Sedna was at its current position, humans had only just invented farming.
Percival Lowell established his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona to look for intelligent life on Mars. Eventually it was used to find Pluto Credit: Alamy. Enter a hypothetical new addition to our solar system — but not as it was thought of before. In , the same Mike Brown who had slain Pluto, together with his colleague Konstantin Batygin — also a professor of planetary science at Caltech — co-authored a paper proposing a massive planet , between five and 10 times the size of Earth. Their idea came from the observation that Sedna was not the only object out of place.
It was joined by six others , and all of them are being pulled in the same direction. There are also other clues, such as the fact that each is tilted on its axis in exactly the same direction. Batygin and Brown nicknamed their predicted object "Planet Nine," but the actual naming rights of an object go to the person who actually discovers it. The name used during previous hunts for the long suspected giant, undiscovered object beyond Neptune is "Planet X. If the predicted world is found, the name must be approved by the International Astronomical Union.
Planets are traditionally named for mythological Roman gods. Astronomers studying the Kuiper Belt have noticed some of the dwarf planets and other small, icy objects tend to follow orbits that cluster together. By analyzing these orbits, the Caltech team predicted the possibility that a large, previously undiscovered planet may be hiding far beyond Pluto.
They estimate the gravity of this potential planet might explain the unusual orbits of those Kuiper objects. Astronomers, including Batygin and Brown, will begin using the world's most powerful telescopes to search for the object in its predicted orbit.
Any object that far away from the Sun will be very faint and hard to detect, but astronomers calculate that it should be possible to see it using existing telescopes. That is why we're publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching.
Or we'll determine an alternate explanation for the data that we've received so far. Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. In Depth In January , Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown announced new research that provides evidence of a giant planet tracing an unusual, elongated orbit in the outer solar system. When was it Discovered? This potential planet has become known colloquially as Planet 9, or Planet X.
It is not the first time that the anomalous orbital behavior of known objects has led to a new discovery. Neither will it be the first time that it has led to nothing more than an improved revision of the measurements. The problem was that the calculations and observations did not add up, which led French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier to propose, in , the existence of another planet further afield to explain the differences.
The planet that was causing these anomalies was discovered the same year, very close to its predicted position, and was named Neptune. With the mathematical discovery of Neptune we were on a roll and the unexplained movements of objects in the Solar System continued to inspire predictions of the existence, and often the location, of further objects in our immediate vicinity. As such, and despite the addition of Neptune to the calculations, small discrepancies in the observed and calculated orbits of the giant planets remained, resulting in the search for a Planet X and the construction of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which eventually led to the discovery of Pluto.
Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet in and returning to the story at hand, it had considerably less mass — around 3, times less — than the Planet X that was being sought. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem.
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