Astronomers discover secret planet in solar system

Scientists have found that the number of planets is increasing in the solar system, as they discovered a secret planet.

Previously, scientists said there were eight planets in the galaxy, including poor old Pluto, demoted in 2006.

Astronomers said there was a 7 percent chance that another planet in Earth's neighbours, hiding in Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than the Earth.

“It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author of the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute.

If the planet is hiding itself in Oorts, it means that it is an ice giant.

“The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory.

Oort-clouded planet has a significantly long orbit, but it does not have a perfect circle around the sun like Earth's orbit.

However, scientists were not 100 percent sure about the planet's existence. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond.

“If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work.

“Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our backyard.”