Planet Nine, a planet the math says exists beyond the orbit of Neptune but that hasn't yet been seen, might also be causing our solar system to "wobble" apart from forcing trans-Neptunian objects in the Kuiper Belt to cluster together.

The existence of Planet Nine was first broached in 2014 by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard. They believe there may be a "massive trans-Neptunian planet" on the outskirts of our solar system due to "similarities in the orbits" of distant objects that orbit Neptune.

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Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech last January announced they'd found signs of Planet Nine using modeling and computer simulations. Then came Swedish simulations arguing Planet Nine might have been formed around another star, and then was captured by the sun.

Yesterday, Batygin and Brown also said the existence of Planet Nine adds "wobble" to our solar system, tilting it in relation to the sun.

The hypothesis was put forward in a paper titled "Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine" by Batygin and Brown, along with Caltech graduate student Elizabeth Bailey.

"Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment," said lead author Bailey.

The new research led by Bailey is based on the observation the sun rotates on a different axis than the orbits of the planets.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all move around the sun in a flat, shared plane. But that plane is tilted at a six-degree angle with respect to the sun, a fact that makes the sun look tilted to those on Earth.

This tilt doesn't agree with the match of how the solar system formed. Because the sun came from the same disk of dust and gas as everything else in the solar system, it should be spinning on the same plane. It's not and that's kept raising scientific eyebrows.

 "It's such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don't talk about it," said Brown.

And this is where Planet Nine comes in. Batygin and Brown's previously estimated that Planet Nine weighs five to 10 times as much as Earth and is, on average, 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. It takes Planet Nine 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the sun.

Planet Nine also orbits at an even more dramatic angle than the rest of the planets: about 30 degrees. This fact, combined with its distant location and massive size, might mean its angular momentum puts the rest of the solar system off-kilter.

"Planet Nine has a really long orbit, so it can assert quite a bit of torque on the inner planets without having to apply so much force," explained Batygin.

"Planet Nine has as much angular momentum as the entire solar system combined because its orbit is so big."

Over the course of several billion years, that could be enough to explain the six-degree tilt we now see.

TagsPlanet Nine, kuiper belt, trans-Neptunian objects, Chad Trujillo, Scott Sheppard, Konstantin Batygin, mike brown, Elizabeth Bailey, Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine