"Extremely distant objects in deep space are apparently being gravitationally influenced by an unseen, unknown massive object" sounds like the stuff of nightmarish sci-fi. But in fact, it's actually fairly run-of-the-mill stuff in the astrophysical community:

Six years of observation from the Blanco Telescope in Cerro Tololo in Chile yielded a total of 817 confirmed new objects, 461 of which are now being described for the first time in a paper posted on the preprint server arXiv...

Of the 461 objects described for the first time in the new paper, a few stand out. Nine are known as extreme trans-Neptunian objects, which have orbits that swing out at least 150 AUs from the sun. Four of those are extremely extreme, with orbital distances of 230 AUs. At these distances, the objects are hardly affected by Neptune's gravity, but their strange orbits suggest an influence from outside the solar system. Some researchers think that influence might be a yet-undiscovered planet, dubbed Planet Nine.

Scientists have long postulated that Planet Nine might exist far beyond the orbit of the farthest-known planet, Neptune, though it has not been directly observed and gravitational evidence of its existence has thus far been spotty.