Ten Strong
The Solar System hasn’t been the same since Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet, and all bets have been off since this monumental decision. Case in point, last year, scientists at the California Institute of Technology proposed that there might be a true Planet Nine in our solar system. The team asserted that it appears to be 10 times the mass of Earth and that it is hiding out in the remote recesses of our solar system—well beyond the orbit of Pluto.
At the time of the discovery, Mike Brown, who was behind the work, noted that the existence of a 9th planet is extremely likely: “Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be,” Brown tweeted. Furthermore, he says, the new object “takes the probability of this being a statistical fluke down to ~.001% or so.”
Similar discoveries have been made in relation to new dwarf planets. Located about 13.7 billion km (8.5 billion miles) from the Sun, 2014 UZ224 measures about 530 km (330 miles) in diameter and takes around 1,100 Earth years to complete its orbit. And so, our littler corner of the cosmos has been in quite the state of flux.
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