A group of astronomers points to this There may be a hidden planet in the Oort Cloud that surrounds the solar system. This disk-shaped region is known to harbor ice fragments and comets. A study positing the existence of a distant neighbor of Earth at this site has been accepted for publication in the scientific journal MNRAS Letters.

ice giant

The solar system at the time it was forming, about 4.5 billion years ago, was an unstable place. At that time, the force of gravity shot fragments from the rapidly cooling protoplanetary dust cloud, causing them to bounce across space. According to scientists, large debris could have been pushed away, like “wandering planets” which completely escaped the sun’s gravity.

According to the researchers, there is a 0.5% chance that one of these planets formed in our solar system and ended up in the Oort Cloud as it moved away from the sun. But, according to the study, it is more likely A stray planet from another solar system has been detected in the sun’s gravity And it stopped somewhere in the Oort cloud. The study authors say the chances of this happening are about 7%.

Still according to scientists, if there is a planet in the Oort cloud, Possibly a frost giantlike Uranus or Neptune. “It is quite plausible that our solar system could have captured such a planet in the Oort cloud,” said Nathan Cape, co-author of the study and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, US. But the researchers made it clear that this star will be very far from Planet 9, the hypothesis of whose existence arose more than a century ago.