We could know for sure in as little as five years.
. If either team is right, and there is no large object to find, current telescope hunts could continue to come up short. In that case, astronomers would have to get more patient, and potentially more creative.
One challenge to the Planet Nine theory is that while it explains the odd orbits of objects astronomers see today, theorists aren’t sure how such a huge planet could exist in the outer solar system. The sun’s gravity weakens along with its light, so a large planet that formed out there should have gotten snatched away by a passing star.
When she runs digital models of the solar system, she finds that at one point in the distant past, the disk could have morphed into a short-lived cone before relaxing back down into a “puffier” disk. And when the dust settles in such systems, they display the same aberrations that inspired the Planet Nine hypothesis, according to two. “You can explain everything that’s been anomalous in the outer solar system,” Madigan says. “And that’s not something I say lightly.
Still, she points out that her story requires its own leap of faith. For the disk to completely supplant Planet Nine, it needs 20 Earth masses of material, the absolute maximum amount of leftover debris predicted to exist. “We’re really just at the edge of what is reasonable,” she says.
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