Message #264874

[Kristin Moore]

"Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be," Brown tweeted over the weekend.

So what do weirdly behaving KBOs have to do with finding a never-before-seen planet in our Solar System?

Well, when you’re suggesting that something as large as Planet Nine - which is estimated to be 10 times more massive than Earth and four times the size - exists within a fairly crowded patch of the Universe, you’d expect to see its considerable gravitational forces affect the smaller things floating around nearby.

And that’s exactly what Brown and his colleagues have been identifying.

"We saw a strange signal in the data that meant something odd was going on in the outer Solar System," Brown told Ian Sample at The Guardian back in January. "All of these distant objects were lined up in a weird way and that shouldn’t happen. We worked through the mundane explanations, but none of them worked out."