PLANETARY SCIENCE:
Another Distant Consort for the Sun?
Richard A. Kerr
This week, two groups of researchers independently proposed that an object several times more massive than Jupiter is orbiting out among the comets of the Oort Cloud, some 25,000 to 30,000 times farther from the sun than Earth. Both groups argue that this unseen behemoth gravitationally perturbs Oort Cloud comets, sending them toward Earth along a distinctive sky-girdling band. But the evidence doesn't impress many other researchers.