Lecar Prize Lecture: Prospects for Unseen Planets Beyond Neptune

Lecar Prize Lecture by Regents' Professor Renu Malhotra on "Prospects for Unseen Planets Beyond Neptune" at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Recent studies have appealed to anomalies in the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper belt objects to argue for the existence of a roughly Earth-mass planet orbiting at about three times Neptune’s distance and a roughly ten Earth-mass planet orbiting at about twenty times Neptune’s distance. I will review the dynamical structure of the Kuiper belt and the case for the existence of such unseen planets in the distant solar system.