Giant Planet Nine at The Edge of The Solar System May Not Be Existing

It was the boldest claim in generations: a ninth planet 10 times the mass of Earth orbiting the Sun far beyond Neptune. The planetary scientists' evidence that proposed the theory of a gigantic Planet Nine was clusters of trans-Neptunian (TNOs) objects that appear to orbit together.

However, last week, a team of astronomers reported that the handful of distant lumps of TNOs were not bunched together by the gravity of a Planet Nine but only appeared to be clustered because that's where the telescopes were looking.

Theory of Gigantic Planet Nine

Beginning in 2016, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown from the California Institute of Technology argued that the erratic behavior of the unusually clustered TNOs was orbiting the Sun at extremely tilted and elongated orbits that could only be explained by a gravitational force of a hypothetical Planet Nine, a celestial body roughly 10 times the mass of the Earth.

On the other hand, many scientists have expressed their uncertainty on the theory of Planet Nine. Recently, a team of astronomers from the University of Michigan led by Kevin Napier investigated whether theories by Btygin and Brown were due to selection bias as reported by Science Magazine.

Simply put, astronomers believed that TNOs behaved in ways depending on how they are looked at. Observing only a fractional subset of TNOs without taking the wider population into consideration would skew perspective.

TNOs still pose unanswered questions to scientists. By nature, these are extremely difficult to observe celestial bodies due to their distance from Earth.

The best way to observe TNOs is to spot them as they wiz past the inner Solar System during their unique orbits, but even then, these celestial bodies are difficult to spot in the relatively bright Milky Way.

Trans-Neptunian Objects

What we know is that there are plenty of TNOs in our star system. In March 2020, a team of researchers utilized data from the Dark Energy Survey, an infrared investigation on the expansion of the universe, to catalog more than 300 "minor planets" beyond the orbit of Neptune.

To begin testing Batygin's clustered trans-Neptunian objects theory, Napier's team utilized three different surveys that use a wide variety of telescopes to observe 14 equally distant TNOs.

Ina paper accepted into the Planetary Science Journal, researchers concluded that data derived from three surveys did not present enough evidence of clustering, which is the foundational argument behind Baygin and Brown's Planet Nine theory.

In fact, Napier and his colleague's analysis didn't rule out the possibility of TNOs uniformly distributed across the Solar System.

Napier tells Science, "Clustering is a consequence of where we look and when we look. There's no need for another model to fit the data."

Batygin defended their theory, saying that analysis done by Napier and his team could not distinguish the difference between clustered and uniform distribution.

Although Napier's research isn't a definitive answer to the question of whether or not Planet Nine exists or not, especially considering the sample size of only 14 TNOs. The team hopes that the Vera Rubin Observatory, a telescope slated to begin operations in 2023, could shed more light on the erratic and unique orbit of TNOs.

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