Produced by: Tarun Mishra
Astronomers suspect a 7% chance that another planet is hiding in the Oort Cloud near Earth, potentially adding a ninth planet to our Solar System.
The Oort Cloud is a spherical region in space filled with ice chunks and rocks, located tens of thousands of times farther from the Sun than Earth.
Nathan Kaib, co-author of the study and astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute, stated it is plausible for the Solar System to have captured an Oort Cloud planet.
Kaib emphasized that hidden worlds like this represent a class of planets that should exist but have received little attention until now.
If a planet exists in the Oort Cloud, it is likely to be an ice giant, similar to Saturn or Jupiter, which often form as twin planets.
Large planets like Saturn and Jupiter have massive gravitational pulls that can destabilize other planets, possibly nudging them to the outer reaches of the Solar System where the Oort Cloud is located.
Sean Raymond, lead author and researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory, noted that such planets would have significantly elongated orbits, unlike the near-perfect circular orbit of Earth.
Detecting these planets is challenging due to their vast distance from Earth. Raymond stated it would be extremely hard to spot an Oort Cloud planet.
Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT, suggested that a Neptune-sized planet could exist in the Oort Cloud but remain undetected, emphasizing that it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those within our Solar System.