How ‘missing’ Planet Nine would change the world for girls

Last month saw an abundance – a positive meteor shower! – of major news stories about space.

February started with some exceptional new images of more than a dozen nearby galaxies, taken by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, which reveal the structures and formations in extraordinary detail.

We’ve just witnessed the US’s first lunar landing in 50 years, and the first by a commercial operation.

On Earth, we survived a near-miss with a bus-sized asteroid, when 2024 DW flew within 140,000 miles of us – which is closer than the Moon ever gets. Around the same time, scientists discovered water molecules on an asteroid for the first time, a key finding that might help reveal how the Earth became “the Blue Planet”.

Each story has taken me back to being 13 years old again, grinding and polishing my homemade telescope mirror, with Star Trek on in the background, alive with ideas and questions.

But there is one story above all others that made me fall in love with science all over again – giddy with possibilities and problems to solve – and one I hope will inspire a new generation of space researchers.

The discovery of the possible location of a ninth planet in our solar system remind us that there’s still so much to explore.

I’m particularly fascinated by Planet Nine. The idea of a hypothetical “missing” planet in our solar system has been mooted for some time, but it has remained elusive. Yet, we now have the capability to detect exoplanets, planets orbiting the distant stars we see in the night sky, trillions of kilometres away from us. So how come we’ve missed one in our own backyard?

We think that Planet Nine may be out there because of the way objects in the outer solar system cluster together. It appears there is an unaccounted-for gravitation force pulling on them. From looking at the way these outer solar system bodies move, we can get a feel of the mass and possible orbit of this unknown planet. Its estimated mass lies between one and 10 times the mass of planet Earth. If it is out there, then it moves around the Sun in an orbit quite different from the other planets.

The eight planets that we know and love in our solar system move in orbits that are pretty close to circular. However, Planet Nine is thought to have a very elliptical orbit, like a squashed circle. At the furthest part of its orbit, it is likely to be around 400 to 500 times further from the Sun than the Earth, about 60 billion kilometres. Also, it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the Sun; Planet Nine could take 20,000 years.

All this means that it is going to be hard to spot – and yet, if it is out there, it feels as if we may be homing in on it.

This is what makes me excited about science and the future. We can take a crazy idea, like another planet in the solar system, and collaborate with others to work out if it is true. Discoveries and inventions often result from seeing things from a different viewpoint or shaking up the status quo. If we can get more people involved from different arenas, then a universe of possibilities opens up.

It’s why I’ve made it my mission to tell everyone to reach for the stars, no matter what their stars may be. Especially people who might not think science is for them. By getting a wider demographic involved, we look at possibilities that might be overlooked.

It’s easy to imagine all the big questions have been answered by now, but discoveries like Planet Nine show we’re just getting started. Imagine all the amazing discoveries that are waiting for us, both locally and beyond.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to visit Isaac Newton’s childhood home for the first time. This was for the National Trust’s Time + Space Award, a new launchpad for young people to help make their ideas happen. We think of Newton as an old, grey-haired man and we’ve been sold the story of an archetypal “genius”.  The truth is, like many of us, he was far from being an A-grade student. As a younger man, he wouldn’t have been earmarked as someone who’d change the way we understand the universe.

What he did have was a relentless curiosity and contrary thinking. He wouldn’t settle for the explanation “that’s just the way it is”. When he had the time and space to explore the questions he was curious about, he made discoveries that it’s hard to even fathom the impact of now. Imagine a world where we didn’t know why things fell to the ground. Or that light is made up of many colours.

I want more people to have the support to explore big, crazy questions, little hunches and huge thoughts. That’s exactly why my question as part of the Time + Space Award asks: “How can science be more accessible and relevant to everyone?”

We’ve made great strides in supporting more women in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – helping them to boldly go where no woman has gone before. But there’s still so much more to do, and other areas of diversity to take on. We need science to be accessible to everyone, otherwise we could be closing ourselves off to the Newtons of the future, the next generation of innovators, discoverers and scientists.

Gen Z feels more confident in their creativity than any generation before, but they need the launchpad for that to be unlocked.

I want any teenager or young person to know they have the right to dream as big as they want. Who knows what could be out there?

Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock is co-presenter of the BBC’s ‘The Sky At Night’, and a judge for the National Trust’s Time + Space Award, alongside David Olusoga, Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Megan McCubbin. Four 16- to 25-year-olds will get a £5,000 package of time, space and support to explore the answer to a big question set by the panel