A New Goblin in our Solar System

On October 2nd of this year, a routine probe of the solar system yielded some unexpected results. While the legendary “Planet Nine” was not discovered, researchers David Tholen and Chad Trujillo believe that they have discovered a brand-new dwarf planet that could provide evidence of Planet Nine’s existence. This planet, nicknamed the “Goblin”, was discovered during a comprehensive and thorough search for Planet Nine. The Goblin’s orbit allows astronauts to predict its location, which has been theorised to be in the Inner Oort Cloud series of objects. This means that it is located in a large spherical shell of frozen objects found far away from our Sun at the edges of our solar system, the Oort Cloud. However, while this relatively small dwarf planet is a great discovery on its own, more intriguing implications from this discovery come from its unusual orbit. The Goblin’s orbit extends farther away than all known dwarf planets in our Solar System, including Sedna and 2012VP113. At its aphelion, the point furthest away from the sun, the Goblin is approximately 2300 Astronomical Units away from the sun. Since one Astronomical Unit is the distance between the earth and the sun, the Goblin can be up to 2300 times farther from the sun than the earth.

The Goblin, along with every other dwarf planet discovered, is an important stepping stone to discovering the mysterious ninth planet in the solar system. The orbits of these dwarf planets are thought to be influenced heavily by Planet Nine. Therefore, the more dwarf planets are discovered, the better chance we have of finding Planet Nine. After the discovery of the Goblin, scientists ran computer simulations in order to figure out how Planet Nine affects the Goblin’s orbit. They calculated which Planet Nine orbits allow for the Goblin’s orbit. It was discovered that a potential Planet Nine orbit affects the Goblin in the same way is it was hypothesised to affect the other dwarf planets like Sedna, meaning that these dwarf planets have had their orbit paths adjusted by Planet Systems’ presence.

But what does this mean for the search for Planet Nine? Well, the adjusted and strange orbit of the outer dwarf planets is no coincidence. Indeed, there is clearly something in the outer limits of our solar system that is just waiting to be found, and many scientists are sure that it is only a matter of time before the ninth planet in the solar system is discovered.