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Scientists have been looking for Planet Nine for quite some time now. For years it has been debated that another planet lives in the solar system. But no one has been able to find it. There have been advocates for it and against it. 

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But going by data gathered in the past few years, a ninth planet is likely to be lurking somewhere. 

Gravitational anomalies along with unusual orbital patterns in the Kuiper Belt have triggered debate over the existence of Planet Nine. NASA is developing a new telescope that can survey the entire night sky. It will be ready by end of 2025 and can determine whether Planet Nine exists or not.

Researchers of a study said a few months back that they had found the strongest evidence yet that a planet is hiding in the solar system and might be the Planet Nine they have been looking for. They say this planet is likely located in the Kuiper Belt. 

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It is small and only has a mass between 1.5 and 3 times that of Earth. However, they are not sure of its composition and say it can be anything -  an icy, rocky Earth, or a super-Pluto. 

They believe that its large mass means that it probably has great internal energy and could even sustain subsurface oceans. "Its orbit would be very distant, much beyond Neptune, and much more inclined compared to the known planets," Patryk Sofia Lykawka, associate professor of Planetary Sciences at Kindai University in Japan and co-author of the study, said.

Past theories about Planet Nine

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The search for Planet Nine has been on since 2014 when Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown stated that a planet bigger than Earth and one that humans haven't found till now might be roaming somewhere in the solar system. 

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The two scientists strongly believe that the planet is altering the paths of distant bodies in the Kuiper Belt. According to them, it is a "super-Earth" and about five to seven times the mass of our planet. 

Strange orbits of objects in Kuiper Belt

Several other astronomers in the past have also presented the theory that something is affecting the orbits of several known trans-Neptunian objects.

Before Brown and Batygin proposed that a body is affecting objects in the Kuiper Belt, an astronomer named Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo noticed that several known trans-Neptunian objects have strangely clustered orbits.

"Since Neptune was successfully discovered in 1846, at least 30 astronomers have proposed the existence of various types of trans-Neptunian objects and have always been wrong," Batygin, a professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology, said.

Meanwhile, there are other who believe that the strange orbits are being caused by a primordial black hole that was created just after the big bang. Our solar system likely captured it as it moved across the galaxy.