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There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “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 own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists are hoping to receive a message from aliens imminently, after waiting for 30 years. But the chances are slim: the message was sent to a star that does not appear to have any planets, and there will only be an hour to hear the message. It is 40 years since Japanese astronomers Masaki Morimoto and Hisashi Hirabayashi composed a message intended to show what humans are like and how life works on Earth, and send it into the cosmos. They did so using a telescope at Stanford University and sent a message to Altair, a star 16.7 light years away that could potentially have life around it. Decades on, a team led by Shinya Narusawa at the University of Hyogo will use a large Japanese telescope to try and see if anything is sending back a reply to our message. Astronomers believe that it is conceivable a reply would come around now, given the distance to the star and the time that has elapsed. They will listen for messages coming from the star on 22 August. That date was chosen because of its significance in Japan’s Tanabata star festival, which symbolically celebrates the meeting of two deities Orihime and Hikoboshi, the latter of which is represented by Altair. Narusawa is hopeful that aliens are out there somewhere and that the message could have really been sent towards alien life around the distant star. “A large number of exoplanets have been detected since the 1990s,” he told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun. “Altair may have a planet whose environment can sustain life.” The original message was sent on 15 August, 1983, as part of a collaboration with a Japanese weekly comic anthology. But the attempt to contact aliens never seemed entirely serious, and so any scientists involved are unlikely to be disappointed. In 2008, when the email was unearthed, Hirabayashi admitted that the pair had been drunk when they came up with the idea of sending the message, according to Gizmodo at the time. “I believe in aliens, but they are very difficult to find,” he said then. He also noted that he had received an array of messages from schoolchildren about the message, which had made sending it worth it. Read More Exact number of people needed for a Mars colony found – and it’s less than you think Strange hidden ‘structures’ hundreds of metres deep discovered on dark side of moon Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into moon in failed mission

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SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 11, 2023--