Most of us are pretty familiar with the eight planets in our Solar System. But did you know that at one point, there may have been a ninth planet in the mix? The only problem is...that planet seems to have gone missing.
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This 9th planet researchers recently proposed is in the ballpark of Mars or Earth in terms of mass. Big enough to be a planet. Pluto is almost 50 times less massive than Mars, which is why it was reclassified as a Dwarf Planet all the way back in 2006. But the prevailing idea for what has been dubbed Planet 9 is something else entirely.

Scientists proposed Planet 9 to explain why many objects way out past Neptune, in what’s called the Kuiper Belt, had elliptical orbits that appeared to mostly cluster in one quadrant of the solar system. Computer models showed that a very distant 9th planet with a highly elliptical orbit of its own could explain this observed clustering, but in order to make that model work, Planet 9 would have to be on the scale of 10 Earth masses. This newly proposed 9th planet is something completely different.

What the researchers from the University of British Columbia and University of Arizona proposed in their recent paper is that billions of years ago the outer solar system had at least one Mars-sized planet, possibly more. Why? Well to them it seemed like something was off. The outer solar system formed the massive rocky cores of the gas giants; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. And there are several dwarf planets like little Pluto and smaller. But there’s nothing in-between, and to them that seemed unlikely. They backed up their hunch with computer models. Thanks to past models, scientists believe the outer planets once had different orbits that shifted as the planets grew and tugged on each other.

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Another Planet 9? Earth's twin may be hiding in the outer Solar System
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Scientists find evidence the early solar system harbored a gap between its inner and outer regions
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"A new analysis of ancient meteorites by scientists at MIT and elsewhere suggests that a mysterious gap existed within this disk around 4.567 billion years ago, near the location where the asteroid belt resides today."

How Did the Solar System Form?
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"While many ideas in astronomy have changed radically over time, the notion of how the solar system formed has changed little in the last 250 years. In 1755, German philosopher Immanuel Kant first proposed the nebular hypothesis, in which a great cloud of material, the solar nebula, preceded the Sun and planets."

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