Astronomer Michael Rowan Robinson (Michael Rowan-Robinson) from the Imperial College of London found a possible candidate for the ninth planet of the solar system on the old infrared pictures of the sky. This object can be a planet several times massive land and removed by several hundred astronomical units from the Sun. Results of searches The scientist has published in the repository of preprints ARXIV.
The first searches of a large planet behind the orbit Neptune Robinson spent back in 1983, using the catalog of objects observed by the IRAS infrared orbital observatory launched in 1982. His efforts led to the opening of the comet Bowell, but there was no signs of existence of the ninth planet. However, in recent years, scientists suggested that a large planet can be very remote and be on a strongly inclined orbit.
Robinson held a re-search for possible signs of existence of the ninth planet of the Solar System in IRAS data. They focused on the sensitivity of the cosmic telescope, which is capable of fixing the planet from the five-fold mass of the Earth at a distance of up to 220 astronomical units up to 20 masses of the Earth at a distance of thousands of astronomical units. Taking into account this range of distances, the planet should look like a point source of infrared light with a wavelength of 60 micrometers.
He discovered several unidentified candidate sources. Fatal analysis showed that some of them can be identified with galaxies. Other possible sources were checked for presence in data covering different intervals: from several hours to six months. A single suitable candidate was found, which could correspond to a planet weighing 3-5 mass of the Earth, located at a distance of about 225 astronomical units.
As Robinson writes, it is necessary to carry out dynamic modeling to find out whether the candidate orbits correspond to the already known solar system objects and whether it can explain the visible clustering of the orbits of the dwarf planets of the bore of the hipper. This clustering is currently the main certificate in favor of the possible existence of the planet x.