The Tenth Planet

Astronomers at Australia’s Royal Observatory assisted John Murray in the astronomical equivalent of the hunt for the White Whale. Murray believes that there is a tenth planet that’s a thousand more times further than Pluto is. It may be as much as 10 times more massive than Jupiter that’s if it exists.
Murray believes he has a good reason to believe that there is a tenth planet. He first started to believe it when he was studying comets and suddenly noticed that an improbable large number of them top out at about the same distance from the sun, roughly 3 trillion to 4.5 trillion miles away. Murray found their motions to be even more peculiar when he zeroed in on the 13 comets with the most accurately established orbits. “They all aligned along a band, as would be expected if they had been perturbed by some large body. The odds of this happening by chance are 1,700 to one, he says.”(Pg. 76)
Murray worked backwards from the 13 orbits and tracked Planet X to a region of the sky centered on the time constellation Delphinus, located in the northern sky. In a single snapshot, the telescope took in 40 square degrees of sky and at least 100,000 stars. One could be planet X. Murray hopes to match one of the stars with a pi

Astronomer Brian Marsden thinks the whole thing is make believe. He doesn’t understand how they didn’t see each other’s object. He thinks they could just be passing stars. He thinks that if they someday see something, it would take quite a bit of time, decades or even centuries.

All of those attributes are similar to Murray’s world, but Murray has a different type of origin. Murray thinks it’s a Jupiter type body that was ejected from another solar system and then captured by out sun. Murray’s Planet X is in a totally different part of the sky than Whitmire and Mayese. Also, Murray doesn’t report any evidence of Whitemire and Matese’s planet, vice versa.

From 1908 until his death, Percival Lowell, an aristocrat engaged in a search for Planet X, whose gravitational bug could account for discrepancies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He then thought he hadn’t found the right planet. Pluto was too far to explain the orbital blips. Many astronomers believe that Pluto shouldn’t be a planet being that it’s only 1,400 miles wide.

Now they are looking for patterns in space, not in time. Most comets remain unnoticed in the deep freeze of the Oort cloud. Sometimes they break free and travel in the inner solar system, disturbed by stars or slight undulations. That’s when they develop gaseous tails that brilliantly reflect the sun’s light.