(January 20, 2016 at 3:35 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: I'd note however, in the last few hundred years, there have been many calculations made pertaining to undiscovered planets. The 'best' instance would be those of Adams and Leverrier that led to the discovery of Neptune.
Unfortunately, despite a huge pile of mathematics, and a seeming score with Pluto, it turns out that case was actually spurious, Pluto is not sufficiently massive to have been noodled to exist via the maths. The Lowell Observatory had announced several possible locations for a ninth planet, so their assertions in regard to Pluto are somewhat diluted as a result, and then when the mass was determined, the Lowell Observatory predictions were all nulled out.
A really 'large' planet out there, and not in the plane of the ecliptic, is seemingly ruled out via dynamical effects not seen on the known planets, btw.
As for this 10 earth masser, Idunno. This prediction actually, to me, gets more plausible the further out it might be.
The problem I see is:
1. It is hard to imagine a planet that massive forming that far out, given the spareness of the available material even during formative years of the solar system.
2. If it formed close in and was somehow thrown to such an extended orbit through gravitational interaction with other planets, it's perihelion should still be somewhere close to where it's original orbit was. It's not clear to me what could have pumped its perihelion so far out from where it was formed.
