Why we can accurately detect stars billions of light years away, but we can’t confirm if we have a 9th planet in our solar system?
In: 2123
The orbits of planets around the sun can be calculated and a long time ago deviations were detected. These deviations can be attributed to other planets having a gravitational effect on the known orbits and a hunt for such uknown planets started and some were discovered.
Today, as we are making measurements more and more accurately, smaller and smaller deviations are detected, which might be caused by still unknown planets, but might also be caused by completely other things.In order to determine why they are caused, you need to detect the *thing* that is the cause.
The difference in difficulty for detecting objects in space between those that emit light and those that don’t has already been explained.
Even if you did detect there was some kind of object floating in space around our sun, you still have the difficulty of determining if it is a planet or not. In order to be called a planet it has to satisfy certain conditions.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_planet)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet)
It might takes years of observations, or even space missions, to determine if something falls into the planet category or not.
Ex: We know “pluto” exists, and it used to be a planet, but it has lost its status of being a planet a while ago.
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