Where you can learn more about how planets are actually discovered

The first 200 people to click on the link in the description will get 20% off of an annual premium subscription

So based off the demographics of people that watch my videos

Chances are that most of you learned at school at some point that the solar system contains 9 planets

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

In 2006, the Internation Astronomical Union removed Pluto from this list and reclassified it as a dwarf planet.

Which lowered the count of planets in the solar system to 8, and has disappointed Pluto fans ever since.

So from 2006 on, school curriculum in the United States and elsewhere has taught that the solar system just contained 8 planets.

But, it may actually have been 9 all along. It just wasn't ever Pluto.

In 2016, 2 researchers up at California Institute of Technology came to a startling conclusion based off of mathematical and computational models.

These models suggested that a huge and undiscovered planet may exist in the far regions of the solar system.

If this turns out to be true, the model suggests that the planet has about 10 times the mass of Earth and about 2-4 times Earth's diameter, making it roughly the same size as the planet, Neptune.

Neptune is only an average of 30 AU's from the sun. 1 AU, meaning the distance between Sun and Earth. Pluto, meanwhile is usually 40 AU's from the sun, while Planet 9 if it exists, would be located an average of 700 AU's from the sun.

In fact, this entire planet's orbit is crazy to think about. It would take between 10 thousand and 20 thousand years for it to make one complete orbit around the sun. This means that at it's closest point it would still be 200 AU's away. The furthest into space we've ever made so far is with the Voyager 1 space probe.

And even then, that has only traveled 139 AUS as of August 2017.

Since planet 9 so far has not yet been observed directly, the only evidence for it's existence are mathimatical.

But, they're pretty convincing. thirteen of the most distant known hyperbelt objects for example all have

Orbits that line up in a very peculiar way.

The clustering of orbits like this is extremely unlikely to have happened just by chance,

But the existence of planet 9 could easily explain it.