An object with a mass 3,500 times that of Earth paves the way for the “ninth planet”. The giant planet, called HD 106906 b, revolves around a binary system 366 light years away from us. It has 11 times the mass of Jupiter, or the equivalent of our 3,500 Earths.
According to Hubblesite (NASA / ESA), this is the first time that astronomers have measured the motion of a giant planet orbiting away from its mother star. It could be the “mirror version” of the mysterious ninth planet in the solar system, which exists as a ghost in the dark outside the “Kuiper belt” (a belt of orbiting objects from the planet). farthest known as Neptune up to a distance of 44 astronomical units from the Sun).
According to Dr Meiji Nguyen of the University of California at Berkeley (USA), the existence of the ninth planet has long been a great challenge. Evidence of this emerged from how objects in the Kuiper Belt region were hit, helping scientists calculate that the ninth planet must be several thousand times the size of Earth and have enormous gravity. But the existence of a planet is so large but so distant that it defies theories, besides that no one can observe it directly.
HD 106906 b has shown that the “9th planet” is fully viable, as it is located 730 astronomical units from the parent pair, or 730 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. One year in this celestial body is equivalent to 15,000 years on Earth, because it takes a long time to circle the star. Hubble also shows that it has a polarized trajectory and lies outside the Kuiper Belt-like debris disk.
The results have been determined by many other super telescopes around the world and promise to be more exposed when NASA’s James Webb is launched into space in the next decade. The research has just been published in the scientific journal The
