There is a tiny goblin orbiting our sun in the far reaches of our solar system and its name is 2015 TG387. This goblin is a planet, and no it’s not because Halloween is around the corner that I’m calling this little guy a goblin, it is simply what it has been dubbed; The Goblin Planet.
This cold little world is orbiting our sun 7.5 million miles away, that’ s 2.5 times farther away than Pluto is from the sun. This discovery falls in the very narrow window of the planet’s orbit when it is close enough to the sun to be observed by us. That orbit, by the way, is 40,000 years long. Good thing we didn’t blink and miss him.
The most exciting part of this new discovery is the fact that it gives us some valuable insight into our unending search for the elusive Planet Nine. That insight is brought to us by its strange orbit. Since the Goblin is far enough away from us that it is unaffected by the gravitational pull of the giant planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune), that means some other larger space object must be shepherding its movements.
Scientists believe that the object may very well be Planet Nine. The Goblin along with six other space objects are orbiting at a particular tilt with a particular pattern, indicating that there is little to no chance that this is simply occurring by chance. Scientists also believe that there could be thousands of similar goblins out there, too distant for us to detect.
For planet nine to have the gravitational pull that is necessary to pull these objects into orbit, it must be somewhere between the size of Earth and Neptune. It also must be between 20 billion miles away and 100 billion miles away. That means it would orbit the sun every 10,000 – 20,000 years. This may seem like a very wide net that many scientists have cast, but in the scope of the universe, we actually have this planet in our cross hairs.
