a pretty weird astronomy story

There may be a hidden planet, a gas giant larger than Jupiter, “inside our solar system.” I put that phrase in quotation marks because the hypothesized planet Tyche would lie in the Oort Cloud 15,000 times further from the sun than our own planet.

The existence of this planet has been postulated in order to explain certain aberrations in the movements of comets. The most delightfully weird part of the theory is that Tyche originally belonged to another solar system but was captured by our own.

GRAPHIC HERE.

This doesn’t mean it exists, of course. The planet Vulcan was once postulated in order to explain aberrations in the orbit of Mercury that were later explained by Einstein’s theory instead.