This hypothetical body was called either the planet Nemesis, or the dark star of Nibiru. As a result of numerous disputes, they came to the conclusion that if such a body really exists, then it is still not a star, but a planet, most likely a giant one, almost one and a half times more massive than Jupiter.
This planet, but rather a massive cosmic body, was needed by scientists in order to explain why the Oort cloud constantly throws long-period comets to the Sun. It is also needed by paleontologists trying to find an explanation for the regular bouts of extinction that occur on Earth every 26 million years.
So Rodney Gomez, an astronomer from the National Brazilian Observatory in Rio de Janeiro, decided to justify the existence of the ninth planet due to the movement of the largest inhabitants of the Kuiper Belt - the planetoid Sedna with a diameter of about 1,500 km and other, smaller objects. The scientist was interested in their extremely strange orbits, which he tried to explain by the gravitational influence of the ninth planet. Gomez himself admits that in fact there are several explanations, but the existence of Nemesis is the simplest and most obvious of them.
As part of the study, the scientist analyzed the orbits of 92 bodies in the Kuiper Belt, and then compared them with the results of computer simulations that take into account the presence or absence of an additional planet. As a result, it turned out that without a distant planet, the orbits of six objects would be completely different.
However, Gomez failed to find the planet itself and determine its size. Nevertheless, he believes that it is most likely similar in this parameter to Neptune, four times the size of the Earth and removed from the Sun by a distance of 225 billion km. However, theoretically it could be a planet the size of Mars (that is, half the size of the Earth). In this case, its orbit should be very elongated - by 8 billion km.
According to Gomez, a mysterious planet was once thrown into space by its star and wandered through space, until it "attached itself" to our Sun. Nevertheless, he does not exclude the opposite option - when the planet formed near the Sun, then the gravitational game of its giant planets threw it away, but not to the end, so that it remained on the far approaches to the luminary.
How much can one trust Gomez and his associates? Are there any misconceptions? What is the basis for the belief that Nemesis still exists?
Actually, this story is old. She is 200 years old at lunch. But seriously, it is during the last two hundred years that astronomers, as already mentioned, have learned to first predict the position of a particular unknown planet in the sky, and then to open it using observations.
Thus, as already mentioned, Neptune and Pluto were first calculated and then discovered. By the end of the twentieth century, many more relatively small celestial bodies, called planetoids, were discovered on the outskirts of the solar system.
In addition, astronomers were convinced that the incomprehensible deviations of the orbits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (and to a lesser extent - Jupiter and Saturn) are caused by the existence of at least one other planet not discovered.
In 1987, NASA made an official statement recognizing the possibility of the existence of planet X. The American magazine Newsweek said: "According to NASA experts from the Ames Research Center, California, it’s possible that some eccentric tenth revolves around the Sun. planet. NASA chief speaker John Anderson suggests that planet X is somewhere here, although not close to the other nine planets. "
At that time, Pluto was still considered the ninth planet, so Nemesis - the so-called planet hiding behind the asteroid Kuiper Belt on the outskirts of the solar system and invisible due to the too great distance that separates it from the Sun - turned out to be the tenth.