Hypothetical Planet

Planet X

What is a Hypothetical Planet?

A hypothetical planet is when someone comes up with a hypothesis that there is something that is or that looks like a planet without having enough evidence to prove that it is an actual planet. There have been many moons like Neith and Themis and stars like Nemesis and Fred Hoyle’s companion to the Sun that are considered hypothetical planets. There are also have been serval planets like Counter-Earth, Planet, Nine and Planet X that are considered Hypothetical planets. Planet X is the one that is mostly well-known and the one that will be discussed in detail.

Planet X

A wealthy gentleman named Percival Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1894 with the help of someone named William Pickering. Percival Lowell began a search for a trans-Neptunian object in 1906 which he called Planet X. The “X” is not like the number ten but an unknown. The other man named Pickering found a possible ninth planet and he called it Planet “O” in 1908. Lowell started on another search for Planet X in 1914-1916. In 1915, he published in his book that Planet X’s mass was seven times more than Earth’s and half of Neptune. It had a distance from the Sun of 43 AU. Lowell’s hypothesis was that Planet X would be a really big and low-density planet. Unfortunate, Lowell died in 1916 and the search for Planet X stopped. It was later discovered in 1919 that Planet “O” was Pluto.