An alien planet may be lurking at the edge of the solar system

In 1906, American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell began a search for “Planet X”, a hypothetical giant planet orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. Lowell was convinced that Planet X existed based on observations of anomalies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. His belief eventually led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. However, scientists later discovered that the dwarf planet was too small to even have a gravitational effect on Neptune’s orbit.

to report Live ScienceToday, the hypothesis of Planet X has been largely discredited; But this issue has not made astronomers stop searching for planets in the far reaches of the solar system. According to New researchthese planets may actually exist, but much further away than Lowell imagined.

An international group of researchers have recently simulated the unstable mechanisms of the early solar system and found that one or more planetary-sized objects may have settled in the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is a vast collection of icy bodies scattered at a distance of several hundred billion to several trillion kilometers from the Sun.

About 4.5 billion years ago, the forming solar system was a chaotic place. Gravity tossed particles around like billiard balls in the rapidly cooling protoplanetary dust cloud. In the simulation results of researchers, sometimes large masses of particles (even the size of planets) were thrown to a distance so far that they escaped from the Sun’s gravity.

Scientists have previously observed such wandering planets around distant star systems. According to the researchers, there is a 0.5% chance that such a rogue planet formed in our solar system and moved away from the Sun into the Oort cloud.

But according to the results of this research, there is a greater possibility that a wandering planet the size of Neptune, from another system, fell into the trap of the sun’s gravity and settled somewhere in the Oort cloud. The probability of such a phenomenon is calculated to be 7 percent, and if so, a mass with the properties of Planet X that Lowell has long sought may indeed exist, although it is too far away to affect Neptune’s orbit.

However, researchers think that the Oort cloud is made up of a collection of much smaller icy bodies. Due to the vastness and distance of the Everett cloud, we may never be able to know for sure what is going on inside it.