Planet 9

Our solar system might still bear the scars from an extremely close shave with an alien star. Such an encounter – the closest pass we know of – would have shaken up objects on the outskirts and might even mean there’s no Planet Nine after all.

Our solar system officially houses eight planets, but some scientists say there could be a ninth hiding on the fringes. Now, a new study has found the oddities could be explained by modified theories of gravity, an alternative idea to dark matter.

Space is an exceptionally strange place, full of signals and observations that defy our understanding of the universe. In trying to explain these mysteries, sometimes astronomers hypothesize extremely exotic objects that we haven’t yet found.

Harvard scientists have suggested that the Sun had a long-lost twin. An ancient binary solar system helps explain the strange structure of the Oort cloud, and possibly the hypothetical Planet Nine. Best of all, the team outlines how we could check.

Could there be a tiny black hole hiding in our own backyard? It’s been suggested that the hypothetical Planet Nine is actually a black hole, and now astronomers have proposed how we might find it in the next few years, using an upcoming telescope.

Well over 100 new minor planets have been discovered in our solar system, in the darkness out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The discoveries were made by sifting through several years’ worth of data gathered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

New research suggests some asteroids could actually be alien, captured during close flybys with other star systems. These close encounters could also explain objects like Oumuamua and might even provide an alternative to the “Planet Nine” hypothesis.

In the last few years, evidence suggests there’s an unknown rocky world lurking on the fringes of the solar system. The astronomers who originally proposed the Planet Nine hypothesis have now published two more papers analyzing the case, highlighting a few new clues.

In recent years astronomers have found evidence that there might be a huge “Planet Nine” lurking on the fringes of the solar system. A new study has now poured some cold water on the idea, instead pitching the possibility that a dusty disc is causing all the weirdness out there.

Astronomers are welcoming the newest and most distant object in the solar system – a dwarf planet orbiting more than 100 times further from the Sun than Earth. And because its discoverers aren’t the most creative bunch, it’s been dubbed “Farout.”

There could be thousands of dwarf planets – Pluto-sized or smaller – lurking at the very edges of the Sun’s influence. Now, astronomers have spotted a new distant dwarf with an incredibly wide orbit, lending further evidence to the idea that a much bigger “Planet X” is out there somewhere.

Evidence is growing for a ninth planet lurking on the edges of the Solar System. Objects out there move in ways that suggest an unseen world is pulling on them, but new calculations suggest that there is no Planet Nine – these distant objects might just be jostling each other like bumper cars.