From my understanding the irregularities could also be explained by a source of mass moving through the solar system at some point. I doubt there’s such a massive planet that far out there, but it’d be cool if there is.

Well, if they confirm it, I say we call it Pluto.

It makes sense that the objects much farther out require not only better equipment, that we’re now using, but the ability to go through lots of records over decades of other work to find the small evidence of something moving very slowly across the stars. It’s how we started doing it, but with much narrower windows of time and lots of hours of comparing slides.

It didn’t specifically say (that I could understand) but I wonder if they’re using the simulations I’ve seen before that narrowed a Planet X influencer to a few areas of the solar system, based on unexplained motions of known objects. It would make sense they are, why randomly pick a direction when we’re sure something is going on from something that might be in a few areas.

What would be wild, and not all that surprising, is to find something, get some decent ranges of its mass and location, and realize it alone isn’t enough, and there’s a Planet X-2 out there as well. Although I guess if it’s large enough the odds of a second gas giant is much less likely than a bunch of dwarf planets, which certainly are still there to find.

Great, I hope it collides with earth and lands directly on my head.