outer Solar System

Yeah.

What if there was a ghost planet completely unseen that is silently pulling the strings of the entire outer solar system?

What's fascinating here is that this isn't just a treasure hunt or some fringe Internet conspiracy.

Right.

It was just empty.

It was thought to be a quiet dead zone before you eventually hit the spherical Oort cloud way, way out in interstellar space.

But as our ground-based surveys got better and our space-based imaging improved, astronomers realized the outer solar system isn't a quiet graveyard at all.

Not even close.

Now, today we understand that a comet consists of a central nucleus made of dirt and various ices, and the nucleus of a comet is only a few miles across.

Due to their elliptical orbits, comets spend most of their time in the deep outer solar system where their ice remains frozen.

But when they pass into the inner solar system, they are heated by the sun.

This causes the outer layers of the ice to vaporize, forming a cloud around the nucleus that we call a coma.