Scientists Find Evidence For Ninth Planet In Solar System

•  Astronomers have found evidence for a planet  which is 10 times more massive than Earth in the far outer solar system.
•  They started to call it Planet 9, which is lurking at the edge of our solar system, is about three times larger than Earth.
•  It revolves around the sun in a highly elliptical orbit. Computer simulations suggest that even at its closest the planet is 200 - 300 times farther that Earth gets to the star.
•  This planet is a distance of between 600 - 1,200 times that of Earth.
•  But , existence of Planet 9 has only been confirmed by computer simulations - No human has ever seen it.
•  At such extreme distances, even a relatively large planet wouldn’t have a heat signature detectable by current surveys, and it wouldn’t reflect much sunlight. That means astronomers searching for it not only need to use incredibly powerful telescopes, they need to know where to look. In other words, it’s like looking for a single, moving speck of light in a vast and nearly impenetrable sea of stars.
• It’s not the first time scientists have suggested the presence of a large, faraway planet. Indeed, such predictions stretch back more than a century, though none has ever turned out to be right.
• Perhaps the best known was that of Percival Lowell, who insisted that a world he called Planet X was waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune. Lowell’s convictions triggered a decades-long race to find Planet X, and resulted in the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
•   But Pluto was too small to explain what Lowell believed were telltale oddities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune; those turned out to be the result of inaccurate measurements, rather than the invisible tugs of a ninth large world. In the intervening 86 years, many more such predictions have been made. And failed.

Defining planet:

Astronomers of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted on and passed the first scientific definition of a planet in August 2006. According to this new definition,

•  It must be an object which independently orbits the Sun.
•  It must have enough mass that its own gravity pulls it into a roughly spheroidal shape.
• Emerging economies are gaining their strenght in IMF. It must be large enough to "dominate" its orbit (i.e. its mass must be much larger than anything else which crosses its orbit).

By: Vishal