NEWS

Planet Nine Could

Be a Mirage
Mysterious patterns in orbits of
small bodies in the outer solar
system could arise from the gravity
of a massive disk of icy debris rather
than an undiscovered giant world

Some four years ago, when Ann-

Marie Madigan first encountered
the idea that there might be an
undetected massive planet lurking
beyond Pluto’s orbit, she felt excited
but skeptical. The evidence for such
a world was then—and remains—cir- Artist’s illustration of a small icy object at the
outskirts of our solar system. In sufficient
cumstantial: strange patterns in the numbers, such objects could explain mysterious
orbits of small objects at the outskirts orbital patterns otherwise attributed to an
undiscovered world far from the sun.
of the known solar system. Propo-
nents of “Planet Nine” (Pluto no
longer counts in the solar system’s the time, she was studying how stars collaborators have developed a in a way that resembles the effect of

NASA, ESA, AND G. BACON (STSCI )

planetary tally) say such patterns
could be produced by that world’s
hefty gravitational influence. But
Madigan, an astrophysicist now at
the University of Colorado Boulder,
wondered whether some other, more
prosaic explanation could suffice. At
can jostle one another into different
orbits as they whirl around super-
massive black holes. And she saw no
reason why her work could not also
apply to tinier things orbiting our sun.
Today, from those modest begin-
nings, Madigan and a few of her
totally different theory to explain the
strangeness in the outer solar
system: the “collective gravity” of a
diffuse, sprawling (and so far largely
hypothetical) disk of icy debris far be-
yond Pluto could alter the orbits of
the far distant objects we readily see
a large planet. Such a disk would be
composed of millions of small bodies,
most of them left over from the solar
system’s formation long ago.
“What we’re doing is taking the
gravitational forces between all
these small bodies into account,”