A planet that orbits the sun in the wrong direction!
Until now, we thought there were only nine, no eight planets in our solar system as Pluto has been relegated as a dwarf planet, but now astronomers have spotted a mysterious planet in the outer reaches of our solar system and it’s orbiting the sun in the wrong direction!
This mysterious new planet is on the far side of Neptune and a unique characteristic of its orbit has puzzled the scientists.
It has been christened as “Niku”, rebel in Chinese, because of its rebellion character as it has a retrograde orbit, or rotating in the opposite direction to the sun’s rotation.
And, unlike all other members of our solar system, Niku’s orbit sends it high up above at an angle of 110-degrees and is rising up at the moment but will eventually cross over and arc downwards below the flat plane of the solar system.
Niku is a small rebel though as it has a diameter of 200km (120 miles) and exists beyond Neptune in the outer solar system, a place we know little about.
“I hope everyone has buckled their seatbelts because the outer solar system just got a lot weirder,” quipped Michele Bannister, an astronomer from Queen’s University in Belfast, in a tweet.
There are a couple of theories for its rebel orbit: it may have been affected by a collision in the past with a much heavier object or it could have been pulled into the orbit by a larger object orbiting somewhere beyond Neptune.
Jim Green, NASA director of planetary science, warned, “It is not, however, the detection of a new planet and it is too early to say with certainty if there’s a so-called Planet X out there. What we are seeing is an early prediction.”
But, as the scientific evidence for Niku seems more solid, the solar system may be having a new resident, that’s a rebel, but a rebel without a cause!