Planet Nine Discovered?

From The Blaze.com (Jan. 20):

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology announced Wednesday that they had uncovered evidence of a giant planet existing beyond Pluto in the outer solar system.

The planet, nicknamed Planet Nine, is estimated to have a mass approximately 10 times larger than Earth’s and an orbit 20 times farther from the sun. It is estimated that it would take Planet Nine between 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the sun just one time.

“This would be a real ninth planet,” researcher Mike Brown said in a press release. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”

Brown and co-researcher Konstantin Batygin came to their conclusion after examining the bizarre orbits of of more than a dozen distant objects in the Kuiper Belt.  [read more]

For comparison, Uranus is 14.5X the mass of the earth. The orbital period is probably why it hasn’t been discovered before. The scientists really need to come up with a better name than “Planet Nine.” Sounds like a sci-fi novel. Have we ran out of Greek/Roman gods/goddesses names? Maybe scientists are waiting until they see it to name it better since the existence is an inference based on the bizarre orbits in the Kuiper Belt.