Dr. Katherine Volk

But if you come into 80 AU, you could cause a warp with something a tenth as large as the Earth, which is roughly a Mars mass.

So the data quality is not great, so we can't pin down exactly what mass or semi-major axis or inclination is needed for this planet, but it's in a plausible range, and it would be pretty sizable.

So I think this is really promising.

It would be helpful if we had more than 160 Kuiper World objects to do this calculation with.

The answer is always we need more data.

But what's really great is because people are searching for Planet 9, this, even though it's a lot smaller than that 10 Earth mass planet that's been proposed, is a lot closer.

So it would actually be brighter than Planet 9 if Planet 9 is real.

So all those people searching for Planet 9 could find this too.

So it's great.

Multipurpose.

Maybe they'll find my planet too.

So what do we expect to find as we continue going forward and doing these searches and looking for more evidence?

The first point is that there's still plenty of sky left to search for large objects in the outer solar system.

I noted the gaps earlier.

I do want to talk a little bit now about this black area of the galactic plane.

Because you notice, even quite close to the ecliptic, there are some areas that are basically no man's land for moving object searches.

And that's because when you look into the plane of the Milky Way, there's all these pesky stars in the way.

So this is an actual image.

So Pluto is actually pretty close to the galactic plane right now.

This little tiny yellow spot right there is the New Horizons flyby search field that they had to use Hubble for.