Wildfires are raging across Greece after about 19,000 people were evacuated from the island of Rhodes over the

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.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 16, 2023--

The Eminem concert in Fortnite starts at 2 p.m. ET on Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, as part of The Big Bang live event concluding Fortnite Chapter 4.

By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase has been fined $4 million by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Former FTX US President Brett Harrison said his new company Architect Financial Technologies is ready to take advantage

We may be waiting longer than normal for Nvidia’s next-generation RTX graphics cards. Nvidia today

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, audio cassettes were everything. Here are some of the most valuable cassette tapes today from those eras, including Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” and more.

TOKYO Japan's Rakuten Group is working with the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, to develop services using AI, CEO

Lawyers for Tesla have asked a federal appeals court to reconsider a ruling that CEO Elon Musk unlawfully threatened employees with a loss of stock options in a 2018 Twitter post

Microsoft Corp. formally filed its appeal against the UK antitrust watchdog’s decision to block its $69 billion Activision

TL;DR: As of June 9, get this 1TB Portable External Hard Drive for only $56.99