(REUTERS) — United States scientists have found evidence to support the existence of the unseen Planet 10, which is much closer than the previously reported Planet Nine, a planet that has not yet been fully proven to exist.
The Kuiper Belt is a disc-shaped region that contains icy bodies, space rocks and dwarf planets such as Pluto.
It is understood that Kuiper Belt objects orbit the sun with an orbital tilt, while those at least some 50 astronomical units away from the sun should not.
It has been discovered by scientists at University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory that a group of Kuiper Belt objects located between 50 to 80 AU from the sun is tilted away from the invariable plane by eight degrees, suggesting a large object with sufficient gravitational influence is causing the warp.
“There is a range of uncertainties for the measured warp, but there is no more than 1 or 2 percent chance that this warp is merely a statistical fluke of the limited observational sample of KBOs,” Renu Malhotra, a Regents’ Professor of Planetary Sciences at LPL explains in a press release.
The scientists believe the warp is most likely caused by an unseen object, which is possibly as massive as Mars, and is orbiting roughly 60 AU from the sun on an orbit tilted by eight degrees to the average plane of the known planets.
Planet Nine, the hypothetical planet discovered in 2016, is predicted to be the equivalent of about 10 Earth masses and is said to be located between 500 to 700 AU.