Photo: ANU
The Australian National University has called on the public to help scour through images of the southern sky taken by the ANU SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring to assist in the search for a new planet in our solar system, the so-called Planet 9, reports.
ANU astrophysicist Dr Tucker is leading the project. He said astronomers had long discussed the likelihood of a ninth planet on the outer edges of the solar system, but nothing had been found yet.
“We have the potential to find a new planet in our solar system that no human has ever seen in our two-million-year history,” he said.
Planet 9 is predicted to be a super Earth, about four times the size and 10 times the mass of our planet. It is also though to be cold and far away, about 800 times the distance between Earth and the sun.