A new study suggests that a rogue exoplanet could be hiding inside the Oort cloud, situated at the solar system's edge.
Mysterious Rogue Exoplanet
Live Science explains that an international research team recently simulated the early solar system's dwindling celestial mechanisms. Doing so enabled them to discover the possibility of at least one planet-sized object hiding within the Oort cloud, which is a wide collection of objects of ice that are a few hundred billion, or even a couple of trillion, miles away from the Sun, NASA reports. The new study is yet to undergo peer review and has been included in the arXiv preprint server.
The area was quite unsettled back when the solar system was still in its early stages of formation. Due to gravity, the fast-cooling protoplanetary dust cloud sent debris that pinged around like pool balls in the cosmos. The researchers occasionally calculated that huge debris chunks, which could be as big as planets, could have been hurled sufficiently far to escape the gravity of the Sun.
Nathan Kaib,an astronomer from the Planetary Science Institute and a co-author of the study, explains how it is fully possible for the solar system to successfully capture a planet of the Oort cloud, Popular Science explains.
Live Science adds that experts have observed rogue planets wandering through solar systems that are far away. The researchers explain that there is a chance of 0.5% that one of these planets could have formed inside Earth's very own solar system and ended up getting situated within the Oort as it was moving away from the Sun.
However, the team calculated and discovered that there are higher chances that a Neptune-like rogue planet from a different solar system got snagged by the gravity of the Sun and ended up resting within the Oort cloud. The chances for this case lie at around 7%.
Live Science further reports that in such a case, the object that is akin to Planet X, which has been a long-sought object, could be out there, though it may still be too distant to affect the orbit of Neptune.
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Planet X
Businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell started the search for Planet X in 1906. This is a hypothetical and huge planet that is said to orbit the Sun beyond Neptune.
Lowell believed in the existence of Planet X due to the irregularities he was able to observe in Uranus and Neptune's orbits. Such beliefs of his enabled experts to find Pluto in 1930. However, experts later found out that the dwarf object was too tiny to gravitationally affect the orbit of Neptune.
At present, the hypothesis of Planet X's existence is widely discredited, per Live Science. Nevertheless, this has not prevented astronomers from searching for planets across the solar system's far reaches.
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