Scientists now believe that our solar system could be hiding a alien planet in the Oort cloud located billions of miles beyond Pluto.
As NASA explains, the Oort Cloud is the most distant region of our solar system. It is believed to be a giant spherical shell surrounding the rest of the solar system.
“It is like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger. The Oort Cloud might contain billions, or even trillions, of objects,” NASA explains.
One of those objects, according to a new report published to the preprint server arXiv, may be a hidden planet.
No, they are not talking about Planet X, or the doomsday planet Nibiru (AKA Wormwood), which is supposed to either herald an imminent apocalypse or cause it with a collision or a near-miss.
According to New Scientist…
Sean Raymond at the University of Bordeaux in France and his colleagues performed a series of simulations of these instabilities, taking into account the gravity from the galactic environment of the systems. They found that up to 10 per cent of the exiled planets may actually hang out at the edges of their systems, refusing to be banished altogether. “Unless we don’t understand gravity at all, lots of planets should be ejected, and it turns out some of them might not quite be ejected at all,” Raymond says.
LiveScience reports that it is possible, according to this new research, that “a rogue, Neptune-like planet from another solar system was snagged by the sun’s gravity and came to rest somewhere in the Oort cloud.”
The researchers calculated the chances of a planet hidden in the Oort cloud about the size of Uranus to be around 7 percent. They also believe the chances of a planet that is smaller than Uranus being hidden out there are even higher.
Now we just have to figure out a way to explore an area located between 2,000 and 5,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun (between 186,000,000,000 and 465,000,000,000 miles) from our planet to find out if it’s true.