How do we profit from a yet undiscovered massive planet orbiting the sun beyond Pluto?
>Among some astronomers, there is a growing suspicion that our solar system’s distant reaches conceal a large, ninth planet that we have not yet seen. New findings about a small ice world far beyond Pluto buttress this idea.
>On Monday, astronomers led by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington revealed the orbital details of the world, which they have nicknamed the Goblin.
>The world, estimated to have a width of a couple of hundred miles, is currently about 7.4 billion miles from the sun, or about 2.5 times farther away than Pluto. But that is near to the closest it ever gets to the sun.
>At the other, most distant end of its elliptical, 40,000-year orbit, TG387 is nearly 70 times farther from the sun than Pluto — more than 200 billion miles.
>Because TG387 remains far beyond the pull of the gravitational heavyweights of the solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — that raises the question of how it got thrown into its current orbit.
>Astronomers — including Dr. Sheppard’s team in 2014 — have now discovered several bodies with such distant, stretched-out orbits. The orbits of these objects seem to not be entirely random.
>In 2016, Michael E. Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology, published a detailed prediction of what they called an unseen planet, bigger than Earth yet smaller than Neptune, that was shepherding the movement of these distant worlds, and could explain the odd journeys around the sun of these faraway worlds.
