There are eight planets in our photo voltaic system – plus poor outdated Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – however what if there have been extra?Seems that could be the case. Astronomers have calculated there’s a 7 per cent probability that Earth has one other neighbour hiding within the Oort cloud, a spherical area of ice chunks and rocks that’s tens of hundreds of instances farther from the solar than we’re.“It’s utterly believable for our photo voltaic system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” mentioned Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer on the Planetary Science Institute.Hidden worlds like this are “a category of planets that ought to positively exist however have acquired comparatively little consideration” till now, he mentioned..If a planet is hiding within the Oort cloud, it’s virtually actually an ice big. Giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are usually born as twins. They’ve enormous gravitational pulls of their very own, nevertheless, and typically destabilise each other.That would have led to a planet to be nudged out of the photo voltaic system totally – or exiled to its outer reaches, the place the Oort cloud resides.“The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, that are just like the scars from their violent pasts,” mentioned lead creator Sean Raymond, researcher on the College of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That implies that the Oort cloud planet might have a considerably elongated orbit, in contrast to the near-perfect circle Earth tracks across the solar.Hassle is, when issues are that distant, they’re fairly tough to identify. “It might be extraordinarily onerous to detect,” added Raymond.“If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our personal Oort cloud, there’s a superb probability that we wouldn’t have discovered it but,” mentioned Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not concerned on this work. “Amazingly, it might probably typically be simpler to identify planets a whole lot of light-years away than these proper in our personal yard.” Time to crack out the telescope.Signal as much as our free Indy100 weekly newsletterHave your say in our information democracy. Click on the upvote icon on the high of the web page to assist increase this text by means of the indy100 rankings.