[Music] scientists think they've got the solar system pretty much figured out but could it still hide a missing Planet billions of years ago additional planets may have orbited our sun giant super Earths 10 times more massive than Earth could these long lost worlds hold the secret to the missing Planet 9 almost every solar system astronomers look at Harbors one or more massive super Earths but our solar system doesn't if super Earths did once orbit the sun where are they now one of the biggest surprises that was just waiting out there for us to discover is
that the most common type of planet in the universe is one we don't have in our solar system we don't have a super Earth and so one question is why not the behavior of Jupiter could provide a clue 4 and 1/2 billion years ago in an infant Solar System Jupiter is on the Rampage young and hot super massive it bulldozes through the planetary Nursery rips infant planets out of their orbits and tosses others into the sun any super bre that Bast and tight orbits around the Sun are toast bombarded and broken by Renegade worlds Jupiter
sends them to an early [Music] it's an extraordinary Theory it explains why there is no super her in the inner solar system but could Jupiter have flung a super Earth in the opposite direction a super Earth that now survives much further out from the Sun in Pasadena Constantin Vatican has developed a model of the solar system that predicts Planet 9 must have an extraordinarily large orbit so the notion that the solar system possesses an additional Planet maybe even a massive Planet like a super Earth is one that sounds kind of crazy but the more we
looked at all of the evidence the more it made made sense Constantine's ideas push the frontiers of [Music] astronomy he thinks Planet 9 is a super Earth that escaped destruction so if this here is the Sun and we draw the initial orbit of Jupiter as a big red circle what likely happens that within the first few million years of the Solar System's lifetime Jupiter's orbit shrunk but Jupiter's travels don't end with its devastating swing into the inner solar system Jupiter's orbit expanded back out its gravitational field acted a little bit like a snow plow picking
up the orbits of any other massive super Earth that would have resided exterior to it and pushing them back out ushering them to ever colder region of the solar system Jupiter's outward swing shuns Saturn Neptune and Uranus to their present orbits it could also have pushed Planet 9 into the very edge of the solar system this move would have transformed Planet 9 into a frozen world that stalks the boundary of interstellar space Planet 9 will be so far from the Sun that its frigid outer atmosphere a skin of hydrogen clouds will be only slightly warmer
than absolute zero beneath that a dense layer of helium gas would produce pressure so extreme that even though it's Potter than a furnace the ice below is crushed solid the center of the planet would have a rocky core with a heart of molten iron Planet 9 would be 10 times bigger than Earth this won't just be a missing Planet it will be our missing superar our calculations suggests that planet 9 is about a thousand times as far away from the Sun as is the Earth this means that if the Sun is the size of a
coin Planet N9 is a kilometer away it is so so hard to see uh such a dim distant planet that we literally have to go to the biggest telescope available on the planet to even have a chance to image this object Constantin believes that if this missing Planet exists he can find it he and his team are searching for the the planet with the Subaru telescope a manuka in Hawaii with the data and the computational modeling that we have done we now have a road map we now can point to the right part of the
sky and say aha Planet 9 must be over there finding Planet 9 is not going to be easy it's exceptionally dim it might take years but we will see planet 9 I'm certain of it if they're successful the discovery will transform astronomy all of the sudden the solar system becomes that much bigger such a shift in thinking only comes around occasionally in the history of humanity so we are we are absolutely blessed and privileged to be working on this problem at this time [Music] the fact that we've perhaps missed a giant planet in our own
solar system just tells us that the universe is going to constantly surprise us and it's a call to study everything around us in far greater detail because we don't know what else is lurking out there astronomers are closing in on their Target in an historic hunt for a massive Frozen world far beyond the he of the Sun [Music]
