Researchers Say There Is Now A 40% Chance A Ninth Planet Is In Our Solar System - Science

More details: See here

Researchers in the US have suggested there is a 40 percent chance a ninth planet could exist in our solar system.

Planet Nine, or Planet X, which will hopefully be renamed if its existence is ever 100 percent proven, is said to potentially lie beyond orbit of Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto, further out in the Kuiper Belt.

While we've all come to learn the pneumonic My (Mercury), Very (Venus), Educated (Earth), Mother (Mars), Just (Jupiter), Served (Saturn), Us (Uranus), Noodles (Neptune), we may soon require an updated version, if the researchers at Rice University in Texas are to be believed.

If there is a Planet Nine, it's said to be 100 times further from the Sun than Earth, and between five and ten times the mass of our own planet.

That's between 46.5 billion to 65.1 billion miles away from us, and temperatures could be as low as -245°C since it's so far from the Sun.

A new study weighed up how likely it was a ninth planet was created in our solar system and ended up in the Kuiper Belt.

André Izidoro, lead author of the study and assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice University, said : "Essentially, we're watching pinballs in a cosmic arcade.

When giant planets scatter each other through gravitational interactions, some are flung far away from their star."