Astronomers say they’ve found hints that an unseen planetary-mass object may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system. And no, they’re not talking about Planet Nine, Planet X, Nibiru or any of the other previously hypothesized worlds out there.
Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory say their analysis points to an eight-degree tilt in the average planes of orbits for the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy mini-worlds that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.
“The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass,” Volk said in a news release. “According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured.”
