Our solar system may soon have a ninth planet — and no, it’s not Pluto

There may be a ninth planet in our solar system waiting to be discovered — and no, it’s not Pluto.

Our solar system has eight planets, but in recent years, astronomers have theorized that there may be a ninth planet hiding in our solar system that we haven’t been able to see yet.

This is because being so far from the sun, it would be dimly lit and akin to finding a needle in a haystack; even current telescopes may not be able to detect it.

However, a brand new telescope that will begin peering skyward at the wonder of our solar system in 2025 may be able to spot it if Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawaii can’t.

Experts told Live Science that the new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could find the elusive ninth planet, nicknamed Planet Nine, in the next few years or rule it out forever.

Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, said: “It’s really hard to explain the solar system without Planet Nine, but there’s no way to be 100 percent sure. [it exists] until you see it.”

A stock photo of the Kuiper Belt / PaulFleet, iStock

With the sun from its distance likely looking nothing more than what stars do to us on Earth, it has been speculated that it could be a gas or ice giant.

Apart from Pluto, which was downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006, no planets have been found beyond Neptune or the Kuiper Belt, which is a massive ring of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets that orbit the sun beyond it.

In 2004, scientists discovered that Sedna, a possible dwarf planet beyond the belt, had an odd orbit around the sun that hinted that another large mass was pulling it gravitationally.

A 2014 study found that a similar object in the Kuiper Belt had a similar orbit to Sedna, and more have been found since then.

The Planet Nine hypothesis was published by Brown and Konstantin Batygin in 2016.

“At first, we didn’t say there was a planet because we thought it was a funny thing to exist,” Brown told Live Science.

“But we tried many different things to explain what we were seeing and nothing else worked.

“Our best estimates are that it’s about seven times more massive than Earth.”

Other astronomers have reportedly said it is “highly likely” that a ninth planet exists, but others are not convinced.

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