hgthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhkhgjhgjhgjBatygin and Brown published the result today in The

Astronomical Journal. Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary dynamicist at the Nice

Observatory in France, performed the peer review for the paper. In a statement,
he says Batygin and Brown made a very solid argument and that he is quite convinced
by the existence of a distant planet.
Championing a new ninth planet is an ironic role for Brown; he is better known a
s a planet slayer. His 2005 discovery of Eris, a remote icy world nearly the sam
e size as Pluto, revealed that what was seen as the outermost planet was just on
e of many worlds in the Kuiper belt. Astronomers promptly reclassified Pluto as
a dwarf planet a saga Brown recounted in his book How I Killed Pluto.
Now, he has joined the centuries-old search for new planets. His method inferring
the existence of Planet X from its ghostly gravitational effects has a respectable
track record. In 1846, for example, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier
predicted the existence of a giant planet from irregularities in the orbit of Ur
anus. Astronomers at the Berlin Observatory found the new planet, Neptune, where
it was supposed to be, sparking a media sensation.
Remaining hiccups in Uranus s orbit led scientists to think that there might yet b
e one more planet, and in 1906 Percival Lowell, a wealthy tycoon, began the sear
ch for what he called Planet X at his new observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 19
30, Pluto turned up but it was far too small to tug meaningfully on Uranus. More t
han half a century later, new calculations based on measurements by the Voyager
spacecraft revealed th