LONDON: Schoolchildren may need a new mnemonic to remember the sequence of planets as astronomers now believe there may be at least two ‘new’ planets in our solar system.
The Solar System might need to be redrawn and grade-schoolers will have to learn a new mnemonic to remember the sequence of planets because astronomers believe there are two undiscovered planets past Pluto.
Scientists from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge believe they have discovered two new planets that are bigger than Earth at the far end of the Solar System.
“We have unpublished calculations that suggest that there could be two planets with between two and 15 times the mass of the Earth,” said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, in an interview with Time.
De la Fuente Marcos said that the discovery of dwarf planet 2012 VP113 last spring is what brought them to theorize on these two ‘planets.’ Ever since, de la Fuente Marcos and other scientists have written two papers on their theories.
The team of European scientists has been tracking 13 small bodies similar to 2012 VP113 that seem to be orbiting the sun in a way that consists of them being subject to a gravitational pull of a massive object or objects. Those objects are the undiscovered planets that de la Fuente and his team are looking for.
If these super planets exist, they would be located about four times as far away as the outer limit of Pluto’s orbit. The report places them at 250 AU, which is a distance of almost 40 billion kilometers from the sun.
The scientist won’t be able to fully spot the planets until the James Webb Telescope or other giant telescopes like the E-ELT are completely built.
“If large planets do exist, these planets must be very dark,” de la Fuente Marcos said.
Even if these theories turn out to be correct, it would take a few years for the International Astronomical Union to consider and vote for the space bodies to be labeled planets. The last planet that was voted for was Pluto and it was demoted to a dwarf planet.
