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tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

According to Scientific American a new paper uses data from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn to help locate the proposed Planet Nine [scientificamerican.com]:

The hunt is on to find “Planet Nine”—a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size—that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world’s largest telescopes.
...
Agnès Fienga at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France and her colleagues checked whether a theoretical model (one that they have been perfecting for over a decade) with the new addition of Planet Nine could better explain slight perturbations seen in Cassini’s orbit. Without it, the eight planets in the solar system, 200 asteroids and five of the most massive Kuiper Belt objects cannot perfectly account for it.

The article also discusses further efforts to gather and examine data sets in an effort to establish Planet Nine’s existence.

Although the journal is paywalled a copy of the Fienga paper is available at arXiv [arxiv.org].

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