Though they've been looking for many years, astronomers have thus far had no luck finding the much-hypothesized "Planet Nine" that may exist beyond the outer reaches of Neptune (sorry, Pluto!).

A new method of detecting it, however, may bring that search to an end:

Astronomers may be on the verge of the biggest discovery in decades — a giant, ninth planet may be roaming around the far reaches of the Solar System, and they're trying to find it...

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies in order to reveal the nature of dark energy.

"The dark energy survey has some of the deepest resolution images, which means we can see objects that are 100 times fainter than in other surveys," Belyakov says. "So it provides us with a much deeper coverage and we can eliminate almost all potential candidates that we've generated."

That does seem like a good approach...

...though it's worth pointing out that, even within the confines of our Solar System, space is a BIG place:

"They injected a bunch of hypothesized Planet Nines into a model of the Solar System and asked, how many of these have been detected with the Dark Energy Survey," Volk says. "There's a lot of unknowns but it's a good example of using survey data to try and find Planet Nine."

By doing so, they were able to eliminate about 5 percent of the places in the sky covered by DES where these potential objects were not found.

Um... they've only eliminated five percent?

Guess we've still got a ways to go!

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