Cometary proof of a planet past Pluto — Science News, May 6, 1972
There have been ideas that our photo voltaic system may need a tenth planet…. In the April Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a mathematician … presents what he says is “some very interesting evidence of a planet beyond Pluto.” The proof comes from calculations of the orbit of Halley’s comet.
Update
The 1972 proof by no means yielded a planet, however astronomers haven’t stopped trying — although it grew to become a seek for Planet 9 with Pluto’s 2006 swap to dwarf standing. In the mid-2010s, scientists hypothesized that the tug of a big planet 500 to 600 instances as removed from the solar as Earth might clarify the peculiar orbits of some objects within the photo voltaic system’s debris-filled Kuiper Belt (SN: 7/23/16, p. 7). But that proof won’t stand as much as additional scrutiny (SN: 3/13/21, p. 9). Researchers utilizing the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile to scan practically 90 p.c of the Southern Hemisphere’s sky had no luck discovering the planet, the workforce reported in December 2021.