Hundreds of small planets newly discovered on the outer edge of the solar system

May help find "Planet Nine"

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, March 15th (Reporter Liu Xia) According to a recent report from the US Newsweek website, an international research team analyzed data collected during the "Dark Energy Survey" (DES) project for four years and concluded that they The outer edge of the solar system outside Neptune's orbit found 139 previously unknown small planets, and the new discovery may help scientists find the ninth planet in the imaginary solar system-Planet Nine.

The main goal of DES is to study the nature of dark energy, which is believed to be the "behind the scenes" that has led to the accelerated expansion of the universe. Researchers say that although DES's "main business" is not looking for small planets, it has proven that the data it collects is particularly useful for such tasks. Asteroids are immature planets or comets that orbit the sun, such as dwarf planets or asteroids.

Researchers wrote in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement that they found a total of 316 celestial bodies outside Neptune's orbit. These celestial bodies are called "trans-Neptune celestial bodies" (TNOs), of which 139 have never been discovered before. These celestial bodies are about 30-90 astronomical units from the sun (1 astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance between the earth and the sun, about 150 million kilometers).

Scientists know about 3,000 trans-Neptune objects, including asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets, the most famous and largest of which is Pluto, which is about 40 astronomical units from the sun.

The researchers said that the newly discovered trans-Neptune objects could help reveal some of the cosmic mysteries, such as the imaginary object tens of millions of kilometers away from the sun-"Planet Nine" or "Planet X".

In 2016, two scientists proposed "Planetary Nine" to explain a cluster of unusually high elliptical orbits across Neptune's celestial bodies. They believe that normal models of solar system dynamics cannot explain this strange set of orbits, but so far, scientists have not found direct evidence that Planet Nine really exists.

DES began imaging the southern sky in August 2013 and completed data collection in early 2019. DES uses a 520 megapixel dark-energy camera at the American Observatory in Tololo, Chile to record data for more than 300 million galaxies.

Editor's Corner

Does "Planet Nine" exist? With assumptions and no direct observational evidence, it remains a mystery. Other scientists have put forward another hypothesis: "Planet Nine" does not exist, and there may be a huge disc of debris outside Neptune. However, there is no direct observational evidence of this fragment disc. The discovery of more trans-Neptune celestial bodies, although not directly answering questions about Planet Nine, at least provided more help in cracking the answer.