Astronomers Found a Planet Nine Candidate—But It’s in the Wrong Place

A team of astronomers says it has identified a single, slow-moving infrared object that checks all the right boxes for it being the long-theorized ninth planet lurking beyond Neptune. The hunt for Planet Nine—the solar system’s ghostly gravitational troll—is longstanding, and is based on the peculiar clustering of rocky bodies in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune. This clustering suggests the presence of some faint, massive object. But the team behind the new study took a new approach to the search: investigating infrared data that’s been collecting dust for decades. The research, posted this month to the preprint server arXiv and set to publish in the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, comes from a group of scientists in Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. The group pored over archival data from two infrared space telescopes, NASA’s IRAS mission from 1983, and Japan’s AKARI satellite from 2006 to 2007. Their goal: find any object that’s cold, faint, and slow e ... Read full article.