WEBVTT

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(light percussion music)

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- The movements of objects
far out in the Solar System

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have led some scientists to suspect

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that there's something big out
there that we've never seen.

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They call it Planet Nine,

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but whether the mystery
object is actually a planet

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or exists at all remains to be proven.

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The clues to Planet Nine are
seen in a group of asteroids,

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dwarf planets, and smaller
icy things like comets

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called the Trans-Neptunian Objects,

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which orbit the Sun beyond Neptune.

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These things are really far away:

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Earth is 92 million miles from the Sun,

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while Trans-Neptunian Objects

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are more than 2.8 billion miles out.

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Pluto, once the official ninth planet,

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is a member of this distant group.

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Some of these objects seem
to be clustered together

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in a peculiar way,

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suggesting that they're
being pulled by the gravity

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of something about 5 to 10
times the mass of Earth.

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But if a big planet
like that is out there,

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why can't we just look through
a telescope and see it?

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The theorized planet would
be so far from the Sun

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that it would reflect
very little sunlight,

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and it must not emit much radiation

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in other wavelengths, either.

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One recent search using
a telescope in Chile

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found a handful of signals
that could be the planet,

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but they were so faint that
they may have just been

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background noise in the data.

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Then again, maybe Planet
Nine isn't a planet at all.

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Some have theorized that
it could be a black hole

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no bigger than a bowling ball,

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left over from the early Universe.

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This would be even harder to spot, though,

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and no one's ever proven that these tiny

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primordial black holes even exist.

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Another theory is that Planet
Nine is a ring of debris

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that has similar gravitational
effects to a singular object.

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If Planet Nine is out there,
it would have an orbit

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that takes thousands of years to complete.

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New telescopes may be
able to aid the search.

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The Vera Rubin Observatory,

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currently under construction in Chile

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and set to open in 2023,

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will image the night sky
in remarkable detail,

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using a 3.2-billion-pixel camera

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that will capture incredibly dim objects.

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It might be able to
spot the mystery planet,

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or reveal something else entirely.

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To read more about this
story, check out Gizmodo.com