The Story Of Planet 9

And the biggest discovery in space

It sounds like the plot of a mid-tier science fiction movie from the 80s. But this story is true.

And fascinating...

The story begins

For over a century, astronomers have speculated about the existence of a large, undiscovered planet in the outer reaches of our solar system.

While the search for this so-called "Planet X" has proven fruitless many times, recent evidence suggests that a truly massive object, nicknamed "Planet 9," may really be out there, slowly tracing an bizarre elongated orbit thousands of times farther from the Sun than Earth.

Early hints of Planet 9

The idea of an unseen planet perturbing the orbits of the known worlds dates back to the 1800s.

As Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who revived the Planet 9 hypothesis explains:

"In 1820, Alexis Bouvard, director of the Observatoire de Paris, noticed something funny about Uranus...Bouvard concluded that either the old observations were in error, or yet another unseen planet was tugging Uranus — just slightly — from where it sh…