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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.

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In 2020, philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice, a book on the risk of human extinction. The chances of "existential catastrophe" for humanity in the next century according to Ord? One in six. It was a shocking number that alarmed many. After years of being flooded with warnings over climate change, rogue AI, nuclear weapons and pandemics, it's hard to disagree that humans face worrying chances. In his book, Ord discusses a number of potential extinction events, some of which can be examined through history. His research involved looking at the number of space rocks that have hit the moon over its history to figure out the likelihood than an extinction-sized asteroid hitting Earth. This was, in fact, looked at in 2022 by French scientists Jean-Marc Salotti, he calculated the odds of an extinction-level hit in the next century to be roughly one in 300 million. By contrast, Ord estimated the risk to be one in a million, although he does point out a considerable degree of uncertainty. Probabilities can be hard to understand in this context. Traditional probability, for example, relies on observations and a collection of repeated events, but human extinction would be a one-off. But there is another way to think if, called Bayesianism, after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It sees probabilities as a ranking system of sorts. Specific number predictions shouldn't be taken so literally, but rather compared to other probabilities to understand the likelihood of each outcome. Ord's book contains a table of potential causes of extinctions, accompanied by his personal estimates of their probability. From a Bayesian perspective, we can view these as relative ranks. Ord thinks extinction from an asteroid strike (one in a million) is much less likely than extinction from climate change (one in a thousand). However, even using Bayesianism traditionally requires the incorporation of observational evidence. So, what do we make of Ord's "one in six"? Well it's better to take it less literally but to think of it as a warning, to jump start action on issues such as climate change to hopefully reduce the risk of human extinction in the next century. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Metropolitan Police chiefs should carry out a thorough investigation of the force’s cyber security practices following an IT breach, industry experts have said. Scotland Yard said on Saturday that it had been made aware of “unauthorised access to the IT system of one of its suppliers”. The company in question had access to names, ranks, photos, vetting levels and pay numbers for officers and staff. The force is now working with the company to understand if there has been any security breach relating to its data, and was unable to confirm how many personnel might be affected. Cyber security experts said the possible data breach is “extremely worrying” but unsurprising as cyber attackers frequently target third-party companies. The Met Police are extremely good at keeping their own data secure, but they do use third parties. As they have to use these parties, if they aren’t up to date with their own security then that becomes a weakness that could be targeted Jake Moore, ESET Jake Moore, global cyber security adviser for software firm ESET, told the PA news agency: “This is another extremely worrying episode of what we seem to be seeing quite a lot of this year. “It’s just worrying to think these police forces are coming under attack in what I would suggest are relatively simple ways.” Mr Moore said the current suspected breach appears to have been “a targeted attack to test the security within the supply chain” where criminals were “looking for the weakest link”. He added: “The Met Police are extremely good at keeping their own data secure, but they do use third parties. “As they have to use these parties, if they aren’t up to date with their own security then that becomes a weakness that could be targeted.” Mr Moore suggested that current cyber security systems used by police forces, coupled with a lack of resources, may have led to flaws opening up. He said: “It’s not impossible to stop this. It’s to do with understanding where all your data is. “When you amalgamate systems, particularly when police forces join together, they tend not to understand completely where all their data is or who has access to it, and that can cause problems down the line. “They need to do a complete analysis on who has access, why they have access to their data, and to reduce all of those weak points as best they can. “It will take time – not necessarily too much money – but it will take resources and people power to mitigate this in the future, and hopefully something like this will shake the boots of all the chiefs around the country to wake up and act faster.” We do have best practices and guidelines in the industry on how to protect the systems, so maybe it comes down to someone conducting an external audit in the aftermath to see whether or not they are following these practices Professor Kevin Curran, Ulster University Kevin Curran, professor of cyber security at Ulster University, agreed that the breach is likely to be down to “a third-party supplier issue”. He said: “I’m not surprised really – data breaches are such a common occurrence and police are no exception. “They have the same resources as a lot of other companies, where any data systems which have external access to the internet are a risk.” Mr Curran said questions need to be asked about why third parties have access to such information, and if the Met has the right data classification methods in place. He added: “It boils down to resources. Every organisation has to allocate a percentage of their IT budget to cyber security. “It’s a publicly-funded organisation so there’s only a finite amount of resources you have, but we do have best practices and guidelines in the industry on how to protect the systems, so maybe it comes down to someone conducting an external audit in the aftermath to see whether or not they are following these practices.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Social media firms should reimburse online purchase scam victims – Barclays Hozier would consider striking over AI threat to music industry Snapchat experiences ‘temporary outage’ as My AI chatbot posts own Story

A class action lawsuit was filed against Roblox this week alleging that the gaming platform