2023-07-01 06:00:12
In 1906, astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell launched a search for “Planet X”, a hypothetical giant orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. He was convinced of its existence due to certain irregularities he thought he observed in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Although this belief led to the discovery of Pluto (Pluto, whose official designation is (134340) Pluto, is the second largest planet…) in 1930, scientists later determined that this dwarf planet (En astronomy, a dwarf planet is a type of celestial object in the solar system,…) was too small to influence the orbit (In celestial mechanics, an orbit is the trajectory that a body draws in space…) of Neptune.
Image d’illustration Pixabay
Today, the presence of a hypothetical Planet X is generally discredited. This does not prevent astronomers from looking for planets in the confines of the Solar System (The solar system is a planetary system made up of a star, the…). According to a recent study, such planets might exist, but would be much further away than Percival Lowell had imagined.
An international team of researchers recently simulated the unstable celestial movements of the young Solar System. They concluded that it was possible that planet-sized bodies had settled in the cloud. Oort, a huge collection of icy objects stretching across the boundaries of the Solar System.
About 4.5 billion years ago, during the formation of the Solar System, gravity caused great chaos in the trajectories of the debris resulting from the rapid cooling of the disk (The word disk is used, both in geometry and in everyday life, to designate a…) of protoplanetary dust. The researchers calculated that occasionally, large debris – up to the size of a planet – may have been thrown far enough to escape the gravity of the Sun (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek ) is the star…).
Scientists have already observed such “wandering planets” in interstellar space. According to the researchers, there is regarding a 0.5% chance that a planet might have formed in our System and yet ended up in the Oort cloud as it moved away from the Sun.
However, the team believes it is more likely that a wandering planet, similar to Neptune and originating in another planetary system, was captured by the Sun’s gravity and took up residence in the Oort cloud. The probability of this scenario is regarding 7%. If so, an object (Generally, the word object (from the Latin objectum, 1361) denotes an entity defined in…) resembling Percival Lowell’s Planet X might exist, although it is too far to influence the orbit of Neptune.
However, researchers believe it is more likely that the Oort Cloud is made up of a collection of much smaller icy objects. Given the size and distance of the Oort cloud, it is very difficult to determine with certainty what is hidden there.
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