We May Be on the Brink of Finding the Real Planet Nine

Thanks to Brown’s research, Pluto, the solar system’s ninth planet, was removed from the pantheon—& the public cried foul. One way to seek redemption: go find another planet. “When she said that, I laughed. ‘That’s never happening.’”

Over the past decade evidence suggests something strange in the outer solar system: distant subplanetary objects are found on orbits that look sculpted, arranged by an unseen gravitational force. According to Brown, that force is from a ninth planet—one bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

If Brown’s hidden world is real, Rubin will almost certainly find it or strong indirect evidence that it exists. “In the first year or two, we’re going to answer that question,” says a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast. Just maybe the solar system will once again have a ninth planet.

Brown: “What we know is that there is a seven-Earth-mass object out there. What it is, we don’t know,” he says. “It could be a planet. It could be a black hole. It could be a cat or a burrito. All of these are possibilities—some make more sense than others. A planet is a really mundane explanation.”

If it’s really out there, it’s too far & too faint for almost any existing telescope to spot. But that’s about to change. A new telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, is about to open its mechanical eyes. When it does it should catch millions of previously undetected celestial phenomena.

In May 2024 a 7,000-pound, car-size camera moved from its California construction site to a 8,700-foot-high peak in the Cerro Pachón Chile mountain range. After a 10-hour flight & several-day, winding, bumpy drive, the 3,200-megapixel camera—the world’s largest—arrived without a single scratch.

Like the prize jewel for a monarch’s crown, the $168-million camera was then almost ready to be set in place within the nearly finished Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The observatory will see its first light sometime in early 2025.

The Kuiper belt, whose population & structure are only vaguely known, stands to be greatly illuminated by Rubin. After nearly four decades of searching, astronomers have found ~4,000 objects out there. “With Rubin, it should go up to ~40,000,” But ultimately, he has his eyes on Planet Nine.

Abridged (shortened) article [https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ldnojbdaap2v](https://bsky.app/profile/johnhatchard.bsky.social/post/3ldnojbdaap2v)

I hope they end up calling it Nibiru.

Both because it’s already what some people think it is and because it will mess with people down the line, who will try to make sense of out timeline after we blow it up.