Astronomers May Have Found Evidence of a New Planet in Our Solar System

Move over Saturn, Jupiter, Earth, Mars and the rest of you: There might just be a new planet in town. Or, uh, universe. Or solar system. Well, you get the idea. Scientists have made a startling discovery, possible evidence of another planet in our solar system, one that could be ten times the size of Earth with such a massive orbit around the Sun that we've never seen it. The news, of course, is causing waves in the science community.

Okay, so a little background info for those of you who don't watch Cosmos. Currently, the most distant planet from the Sun in our solar system is Neptune, which is 30 "astronomical units" (a measurement of distance in space) away. One AU is about 93 million miles (the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun). Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt, which is a small ring of objects ranging from 30 to 55 AUs away from the Sun. The is where Pluto, once considered the ninth planet but which as since been downgraded to a "dwarf planet" or "plutoid," resides. And beyond that is where astronomers made their discovery, another dwarf planet, designated VP113 (sometimes called VP for short or by its nickname Biden, after Vice President Joe Biden). Basically, it's an object the size of Pluto but at 83 AUs it's farther than anything else in our solar system.

VP113 (AKA VP or Biden) was discovered by astronomers who took pictures of the sky about an hour apart with something called the Dark Energy Camera — a super camera that is specifically built to pick up the faintest bits of light — in Chile. When the astronomers turned the images into a time-lapse video, they saw something barely moving. That something was VP113. "This object has the most distant orbit known," Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told The Guardian. "It extends the known boundary of the observable solar system."

The discovery of VP113 is exciting because it's similar to Sedna, another dwarf planet found in 2003. Sedna was just as far away as VP113, and back when it was found, scientists had their doubts. But VP113 gives that discovery credence. "Finding Sedna so far away seemed odd and potentially a fluke," Mike Brown, professor of astronomy at California Institute of Technology, explained to CNN "But this one is beginning to make it look like that might be a typical place for objects to be. Not at all what I would have guessed."

Both VP113 and Sedna are where astronomers wouldn't have thought anything like them to be and don't behave like they should in how they move. In fact, no one really knows how they got there. So far, scientists have it down to two theories. "One leading hypothesis proposes that in the Solar System’s infancy, a nearby star gravitationally perturbed the coalescing system and dragged some fragments out towards the edge," reports Nature. "Another possibility is that a massive rogue planet passed through at some point, kicking objects from the Kuiper belt outwards into the inner Oort cloud [a solar system near the Kuiper Belt]."

So basically, there's a 50 percent chance that this discovery of a tiny dwarf planet could be evidence of that other massive rouge planet that's orbiting our sun but that we've never seen. For now, astronomers will sit back and monitor VP113. Whether or not there really is a ninth planet will be subject to lots of future speculation and analysis. No matter what happens though, one thing is for sure — to quote Joe Biden, this is a big fucking deal.

[Image via Flickr - Eric Vanderpool]