Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
This is legit folks! For those who are at a university (like Vanderbilt), this press release has a link to the actual research article in the Astronomical Journal. It’s a bit heavy at times but well done.
There’s also a pretty good article on Wired: This Isn’t the First Time Astronomers Have “Found” a Planet Nine
(from the press release) The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Also, when viewed in three dimensions, they tilt nearly identically away from the plane of the solar system. Batygin and Brown show that a planet with 10 times the mass of the earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration.
