Where is Planet 9 ?

The real take home is that this planet is out there and perhaps five times larger in mass than Earth.  This is likely no gas giant but still large enough to have its own orbitals and suck in material from the Oort cloud.

We can now use the increasing back ground of smaller objects to slowly narrow down its actual location

this is going to take a while, but we now believe it exists.

Where is Planet 9 ?

May 3, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/statistical-evidence-for-another-planet-at-the-edge-of-our-solar-system.htm

Researchers closely tracked and computationally analyzed moon and asteroid sized objects beyond Neptune and determined that a ninth planet about five times bigger than the Earth is about 16 times further than Pluto. A planet matching Planet Nine’s expected characteristics would still be relatively small, with a mass just five times that of Earth, and a distance of some 500 times that of our own distance from the Sun.

More powerful telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will help answer the question and find or fail to find Planet 9. There should also be many smaller planets at the edge of the solar system in the Pluto, Mercury and Mars size range. Vera C. Rubin Observatory first light for the engineering camera is expected in August 2024, while system first light is expected in January 2025 and full survey operations are aimed to begin in August 2025. LSST data is scheduled to become fully public after two years.

The calculations also indicate that unless the mass of the inner Oort Cloud is taken to be unreasonably large (i.e., tens to hundreds of Earth masses), the characteristic timescale of these cycles would far exceed the age of the sun. Therefore, at present, Planet 9 remains the only plausible explanation for the observed distribution of longperiod Neptune-crossers.

Researchers looked towards those objects (30-100 AU from the sun), and tried to understand their movements. Dr Batygin claimed, the best explanation is that they result from another, undiscovered planet.

The team carried out a host of simulations to understand how those objects’ orbits were affected by a variety of things, including the giant planets around them such as Neptune, the “Galactic tide” that comes from the Milky Way, and passing stars.