A planet seen 336 light-years from Earth could help scientists learn more about whether there is a large “New Planet” or “Planet X” hiding on the outskirts of our solar system.
Why it’s important: Scientists have been looking for the hypothetical New Planet for years. The new characterization of this alien planet by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that worlds like the theoretical planet can exist in other solar systems.
Details: The exoplanet is “very widely separated from its host stars in an eccentric and highly misaligned orbit, as is the prediction of the new planet,” said Meiji Nguyen, author of the new study of the planet in the Earth. Astronomical Journal he said in a statement.
- “This raises the question of how these planets formed and evolved to end up in their current configuration.”
- The double star system in which the planet was found is relatively young, 15 million years old, suggesting that such worlds could have formed early in the history of their solar systems.
- Scientists suggest that the planet may have ended up in its strange orbit because it was launched away from its stars at some point in the past.
The big picture: Researchers think the New Planet could exist in our solar system due to the strange orbits of a handful of objects passing Neptune in what is known as the Kuiper belt.
- Proponents of the theory suggest that the gravity of a large planet in a strange orbit may be shaping how these other bodies move.
- The exoplanet studied by Hubble could serve as a good model for what the history of the New Planet might have looked like in our solar system.
- “It’s like we have a time machine for our own planetary system that goes back 4.6 billion years to see what may have happened when our young solar system was dynamically active and everything was being surrounded and rearranged,” he said. say Paul Kalas, another author of the study, it was said in the statement.