The presence of a hidden planet may further redefine what humanity knows about the solar system

While growing up, most millennials were taught that the solar system has nine planets, but things changed when Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet and excluded. This just goes to show that as humanity learns more about the universe, what we knew in the past might not necessarily be true in the futrue. More than a decade after cutting down the number of planets in the solar system from nine to eight, scientists are looking into the presence of another secret planet. According to indy100, astronomers have calculated that there is a 7% chance that our planet has a secret neighbor hidden in a mass of icy clouds in space.

The spherical region full of ice chunks is known as the Oort cloud, which also consists of rocks and debris, is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun compared to our planet. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” Nathan Kaib, a co-author of the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute, told the outlet. "Hidden worlds like this are a class of planets that should exist but have received relatively little attention."

It is believed that the hidden planet in the Oort cloud is most probably a mass of ice. It was possibly nudged out of the solar system because of the gravitational pull of larger planets in our solar system like Jupiter and Saturn. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” Sean Raymond, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory, explained.

Scientists have also theorized that the planet hidden in the Oort cloud probably has a bit of an elongated orbit unlike Earth which revolves around the sun in almost perfect circles. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” Raymond added. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT who was not involved in this study, mentioned per the outlet. "Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our backyard.”

According to NASA, the Oort cloud lies far beyond Pluto on the farthest edge of the Kuiper's Belt. The Belt itself is like a thick bubble circling our solar system that houses a lot of comet-like objects and celestial remains. "Though long-period comets observed among the planets are thought to originate in the Oort Cloud, no object has been observed in the distant Oort Cloud itself, leaving it a theoretical concept for the time being," the official NASA website mentions. NASA's Voyager I vessel might need to travel about a million miles per day and it will take the spacecraft about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side.