Asia’s oil refiners, responsible for meeting about a third of the world’s fuel consumption, are getting ready to

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The risks of harvest failures in multiple global breadbaskets have been underestimated, according to a study Tuesday that researchers said should be a "wake up call" about the threat climate...

By Kanishka Singh Mass shootings in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Fort Worth claimed the lives of 10 people ahead

The Fourth of July holiday takes on a different meaning for the Highland Park, Illinois, community this year

By Elizabeth Pineau PARIS (Reuters) -A crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the family of the policeman who shot dead

Portugal hired Ernst & Young and Banco Finantia SA to carry out valuations of TAP SA as part

The European Union is set to announce this week its withdrawal from the controversial Energy Charter Treaty, after

Minister Catherine Martin announces an independent, root and branch examination of broadcaster RTÉ.

An Eritrean asylum seeker angry with officials murdered a girl and wounded her friend.

Dozens of people with flowers have come to say goodbye to an award-winning Ukrainian writer who was killed by a Russian missile attack on a popular restaurant in east Ukraine

Belarus let Russian forces invade Ukraine from its territory and is now hosting its nuclear weapons.