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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If you’re one of the many people who loves sleep and finds it a huge struggle to get up in the mornings, we’ve got some news that might just make you feel a little better. As it turns out, scientists have released a new study which suggests that hitting snooze on your alarm may actually be good for you. A new study has claimed that the extra sleep brought by snoozing an extra half hour in the mornings could help to improve cognitive performance. The research published in the Journal of Sleep Research surveyed more than 1,700 adults from across the world and looked into their morning habits. According to the study, a total of 69 per cent of those involved admitted they snoozed their alarms at least some of the time. Then, 31 of these people were tested and the researchers found that snoozing their alarms improved some of their scores following cognitive examinations. The tests they were subjected to involved things like memory tests and basic maths questions. Compared to not snoozing for 30 minutes, when the people did snooze they either improved their scores in the tests or their performance was not affected. "Snoozing for 30 minutes in the morning does not have any major negative effects on the sleep that night or how tired one feels when waking up," said Tina Sundelin [via Live Science], who is the lead study author and psychologist at Stockholm University in Sweden. "For those who are drowsy in the morning, such as evening people, and find that snoozing helps them wake up, the study shows that they may actually be more objectively alert [meaning that they performed better on the cognitive tests] after snoozing — even if they don't feel more or less sleepy.” It comes after a sleep expert revealed the worst common sleeping position for people which could be bad for our health. Sign up for 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

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