The hunt for ‘planet nine’: why there could still be something massive at the edge of the Solar System

By Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University

Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the Solar System? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s. Labelled as planet X, prominent astronomers had put it forward as an explanation for Uranus’s orbit, which drifts from the path of orbital motion that physics would expect it to follow. The gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet, several times larger than Earth, was seen as a possible reason for the discrepancy.

That mystery was ultimately explained by a recalculation of Neptune’s mass in the 1990s, but then a

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