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Planet Nine / Planet 9: Hypothetical 9th Planet In Our Solar System

A review and re-analysis of data from a 1983 infrared astronomy satellite has revealed a suggestive trio of data points consistent with a possible ninth planet.
Mysterious Object Glimpsed Decades Ago Might Have Actually Been Planet Nine

Astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson of Imperial College London in the UK conducted an analysis of data collected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1983, and found a trio of point sources that just might be Planet Nine.

This, Rowan-Robinson concludes in his preprint paper, is actually fairly unlikely to be a real detection, but the possibility does mean that it could be used to model where the planet might be now in order to conduct a more targeted search, in the quest to confirm or rule out its existence.

"Given the poor quality of the IRAS detections, at the very limit of the survey, and in a very difficult part of the sky for far infrared detections, the probability of the candidate being real is not overwhelming," he wrote.

"However, given the great interest of the Planet 9 hypothesis, it would be worthwhile to check whether an object with the proposed parameters and in the region of sky proposed, is inconsistent with the planetary ephemerides." ...

IRAS operated for 10 months from January 1983, taking a far-infrared survey of 96 percent of the sky. In this wavelength, small, cool objects like Planet Nine might be detectable, so Rowan-Robinson decided to re-analyze the data using parameters consistent with Planet Nine.

Of the around 250,000 point sources detected by the satellite, just three are of interest as a candidate for Planet Nine. In June, July, and September of 1983, the satellite picked out what appears to be an object moving across the sky.

It's not a dead cert, by a long shot. ...

Rowan-Robinson also notes that another highly sensitive survey, Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), in operation since 2008, has failed to recover the candidate.

However, if we interpret the candidate as real, we can extrapolate some information about Planet Nine. According to the IRAS data, it would be between three and five times the mass of Earth, at an orbital distance of around 225 astronomical units. ...
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FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/histor...may-be-a-decades-old-detection-of-planet-nine

ABSTRACT Of The Paper Submitted For Publication:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03831
 
Results of a 6-year survey effort covering the southern skies did not turn up any significant detections indicating the presence of a ninth planet.
Planet Nine is still missing in action after survey of 87% of the Southern Sky

Astronomers searching for our solar system's elusive Planet Nine — a theoretical world that may lurk deep in a cloud of icy rocks far beyond the orbit of Neptune — have come up short once again.

In a recent paper published Dec. 23, 2021 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers pored over six years of telescope data in an attempt to identify potential signs of Planet Nine in the southern sky. Captured with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile between 2013 and 2019, the observations covered about 87% of the sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

While the team identified more than 3,000 candidate light sources located between 400 and 800 astronomical units (AU) away (that's 400 to 800 times the distance between Earth and the sun), none of those candidates could be confirmed as planets. ...

However, the fruitless search doesn't disprove the theoretical planet's existence: It merely narrows down where that planet may be lurking, and what its properties could be, the researchers said. Ultimately, the study covers between just 10% and 20% of the planet's possible locations in the sky.
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/planet-nine-still-no-evidence

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2307
 
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