Secret to finding hidden ninth planet in our solar system coming soon, scientists claim

For a long time, children learning about space in school were taught that there were nine planets in our solar system.

Then, we lost Pluto after it was demoted to a dwarf planet back in 2006 and we were down to eight – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

However, our understanding of our solar system could be about to shift once again, as scientists believe they’re on the brink of discovering a ‘hidden’ planet which could soon be officially recognised.

Experts who believe in this object, dubbed Planet Nine, claim it’ll be a gas or ice giant big enough to be considered a real planet and not a dwarf planet, and the key to its discovery lies in the opening of a new observatory.

In fact, astronomers believe this object will be around seven times the size of Earth – and it could soon be spotted through study undertaken at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory which opens in 2025.

Why haven’t we seen Planet Nine before now? It’s thought that this object is far, far further out in the solar system than the rest of the planets – orbiting the Sun billions of miles out.

Mike Brown is an astronomer at Caltech who has been a leading figure in the search for Planet Nine.

He told Live Science: “It's really difficult to explain the solar system without Planet Nine.

"But there's no way to be 100 percent sure until you see it."

The difficulty in observing the theoretical Planet Nine is the distance away from Earth. Given it would be billions of miles away, the light it would reflect from the Sun would be incredibly difficult to detect by the time it reached us.

To detect it, experts will need the new technology on offer at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which cost a whopping$473 million and features the biggest digital camera ever made which will help astronomers to look further into space than ever before.

It comes after two teams of astronomers led by scientists at Caltech discovered the largest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe – and it's 30 billion trillion miles away.

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