A star taking birth from a cloud of dust and gas. This cloud can also seed planets that will orbit the star.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech)Pluto's reclassification as a minor planet in 2006 sparked worldwide controversy and a groundswell of sympathy for the demoted dwarf. But what if we told you that there might be another mysterious planet lying in the great reaches of our solar system?
There have been a lot of speculations in the scientific community regarding the existence of a mysterious ninth planet in our solar system — commonly termed ‘Planet 9’ or ‘Planet X’.
The gravitational effects of this planet would help explain the peculiar orbital behaviour of many objects in our solar system. However, there is no concrete evidence to point to its existence yet.
Now, Michigan State University's Seth Jacobson and colleagues in China and France have unveiled new models that seek to uncover the mystery of how our solar system evolved. This research inadvertently implicates the potential existence of Planet X, although the team did not emphasise it in the paper.
Explaining the giants’ orbits
The team worked on a new theory that would explain why our solar system’s gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — have peculiar orbits. These planets were originally believed to revolve in compact, evenly-spaced orbits, but something threw them off over time.
"Our solar system hasn't always looked the way that it does today. Over its history, the orbits of the planets have changed radically," said Jacobson, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Science's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Out of this arose the ‘Nice’ model — an explanation that posited that chaotic gravitational interactions between these planets caused instability in the system, which eventually threw the gas giants into their current oblong and askew orbits.
However, scientists still didn’t know what could have caused such instability in the first place. The Nice model suggested that the instability happened hundreds of millions of years after the first dispersal of the gas disk that engulfed and birthed the solar system. This was surprising because new evidence gathered from moon rocks in 2005 suggests that the instability actually happened much earlier — just a few million years after the birth of our solar system.
In an attempt to provide fresh a new explanation, the team came up with the theory that the dissipation of the primordial gases in our solar system might have happened from the inside out, which would create gravitational complications as the edge of the dissipation boundary overlapped the planets in their old orbits — creating new instabilities.
An artist’s rendering shows a hypothetical early solar system with a young star clearing a path in the gas and dust left over from its formation. This clearing action would affect the orbits of gas giants orbiting the star.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC))The potential Planet X
Some scientists also speculate that this instability may have also caused Planet X to get hammer-thrown out of the solar system. Planet X would be orbiting 39 to 78 billion miles from the Sun if it exists. For comparison, Neptune — the planet furthest from the sun in our solar system — is only 3 billion miles from the star.
Another piece of evidence supporting this explanation is that Earth has unique geochemistry that would only be possible if materials were mixed from both the outer and inner solar systems. The inside-out dissipation theory explains this as well.
The team used simulations to test the theory out. These models simulated conditions where the outer solar system started with five planets at birth, and they predicted it ending up with four. This is exactly what we observe in real life. A neat animation of the simulation is available here.
"Planet 9 is super controversial, so we didn't stress it in the paper," Jacobson said, "But we do like to talk about it with the public."
In 2015, however, Caltech had found mathematical evidence that Planet X might exist. This Neptune-sized planet would have mass ten times that of the Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune. The mathematical prediction of this planet could explain the unique orbits of some smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt — a distant region of icy debris that extends far beyond the orbit of Neptune.
“It's too early to say with certainty there's a so-called Planet X,” remarks Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, however. “What we're seeing is an early prediction based on modelling from limited observations. It's the start of a process that could lead to an exciting result."
In any case, humanity should have a solution soon. If Planet X exists, the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is expected to be operational by the end of 2023, should be able to detect it using its novel Simonyi Survey Telescope.
The study was recently published in the journal Nature, and can be accessed here.
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