Introduction - Our Solar System
   For some time now, many astronomers, both amateur and professional, have been racing to prove the existence of the tenth planet in our solar system. Here is the latest information.

The current facts about the rest of the solar system are as follows :-

1. THE SUN 
Our Star, and the centre of our planetary system. It is very large and infact contains 99.86% of the mass of our solar system. It is mostly hydrogen and helium.

2. MERCURY 
The first planet from the sun, rotates in 58.75 days. and is very rocky without any atmosphere

3. VENUS 
The second planet, covered in clouds of gas which reflect and make it very bright, almost like another star at times. It rotates clockwise every 243 days. All the other planets rotate anti-clockwise.

4. EARTH 
Spins very rapidly - once every 23h 53 mins

5. MARS 
Very slow orbit of 687 years. Our neighbour, could have sustained life in the distant past, but now sadly dormant.

6. JUPITER 
This is the largest planet and is a tenth of the diameter of the sun. It is mostly hydrogen. Jupiter has very interesting moons, Especially Europa, which is thought to contain oceans of water under an ice  surface. And is the best possibility of extraterrestrial life existing in the solar system.

7. SATURN 
Orbits every 29.5 years and rotates every 10 hours, famous for it's rings

8. URANUS 
Low density and four times the size of earth, with five rings

9. NEPTUNE 
Orbits the sun every 165 years and it's surface temperature is -230C And the atmosphere is methane

10. PLUTO 
This little planet orbits in a highly inclined eccentric orbit that takes a staggering 248 years  and was discovered in 1930. It has a satellite called Charon which was discovered in 1978, and together they act like a binary pair.

BELOW IS A TABLE COLLATING THE USUALLY QUOTED DATA - - -
 

THERE IS ALWAYS MORE . . .
     Over the years, people have claimed to find extra planets and objects, swimming around in the immediate solar system. There are comets and meteorites,  Oort clouds and regular reports of extra moons detected and the occasional extra planet!....

Charles Kowal's Mini-Planet
     On 8th November 1997 Charles Kowal of the Hale Observatory, Pasadena, California, announced that he had detected a minute planet, possibly a tenth the size of Mercury, between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus on 18-19 Oct 1977

NASA's Tenth Planet
    Specific deviations in the movements of the planets Uranus and Neptune have recently been detected, which NASA says is convincing evidence to prove the existence of an as yet unknown solar body of at least 4 - 8 times the mass of Earth. This planet appears to have a very large orbit which brings it close to the Earth every 3000 - 3600 years. And should start to become visible to us on Earth somewhere about 2012 - 2036.
    The planet is just beyond 7,000,000,000 from The Sun and NASA have yet to give it a name, or confirm it's size and velocity. This planet has been taken seriously by astronomers since 1978, and they call it "Planet X".
    In  1983 something was spotted by IRAS ( Infrared Astronomical Satellite ), unusual and unexplained perturbations were found in the orbit of Neptune in the infrared spectrum, which cannot be explained by Pluto alone because it is not big enough. But several astronomers went over this in the late 1980's, but they were all unable to confirm anything.

Back From The Past
     If this planet does really have an exceptionally eccentric orbit that brings it close every 3000 - 3600 years, then you would have expected it to have been visible to our human ancestors, about 1600 - 1400 bc.  Some people are claiming that the Sumerians observed the planet and new all about it, calling it NIBIRU. Sumer was supposed to be the "seat of civilization" or where civilization first emerged. These were certainly exceptionally advanced people for the time, but could any of this be true? The ancient Sumerian texts allegedly describe this planet as, watery and as glowing and brilliant. Are we going to rediscover this in the next twenty years?

Bode's Law
     This is an interesting concept. It is a simple mathematical rule which can be used to predict where planets fall in a solar system. But controversially, we have one missing.
    It goes like this,
 

   Now the trouble with this is that it advocates the EXPLODED PLANET HYPOTHESIS ( E. P. H. ), because of the gap between Mars and Jupiter where there is an asteroid belt.
     The law itself is 220 years old, and was very popular with Astronomers at the time, but when the contemporary astronomers tried to use it to account for all the comets and meteors in the sky, it fell out of favour.  However in the 1970's Modern data was achieved using telescopes and space probes, and it added weight to the theory. Indeed there has been recent studies to confirm it using  computation, maths and statistics to wind back the asteroid belt, millions of years in time, to it's origin which appears to be the missing planet.
     There are many Astronomers who still prefer the much more complex theory that asteroids and comets are the leftovers from planet formations.  However it is said that this was the method used to discover Pluto.

The Lost Moon Of Venus
     In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were many observations of a satellite of Venus. This is particularly odd because it doesn't have one at all now. The astronomers who observed this body were highly respected men, one was Cassini, who was the discoverer of  the division in Saturn's rings.
     The Satellite was accurately recorded as being a quarter of the diameter of Venus and it's orbit was 11 days and five hours.
The satellite no longer exists, we have failed to find it with telescopes and probes, where did it go?

Planet Vulcan
     At numerous times over the last 200 years, astronomers have announced that they have found a new planet which they have called Vulcan. In the 1850 & 60's a french mathematician named Le Verrier, saw a black spot in front of the Sun, which he concluded to be a planet, that was between Mercury and the Sun. He calculated orbit and size, but It was probably only a comet.

Latest Addition
     As a regular reader of the journal the New Scientist, I spotted recently reference to an article regarding the Planet Blondie, where two astronomers, both Blondie fans, think they've found the elusive tenth planet. And both wanted to call it Blondie.  Both men apparently simultaneously duplicated their results and name without knowing about the other!
     John Matisse, of the University of Louisiana, was studying the orbits of long-period comets. And he found more comets than he expected, came from a particular band of the Oort cloud. He reasons that a large planet 150 to 600% of the mass of Jupiter must have deflected them toward the Sun. Further studies caused him to hypothesize that the new planet is 0.4 light years away, ( 100 times Neptune's distance from the Sun ), and would orbit the Sun in about 4 to 5 million years. His announcement was made in early October 1999.
     Meanwhile, John Murray, of the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, has independently come to the following conclusions. It must be roughly the size of Jupiter, It orbits the Sun approximately every 6 million years at a distance of 0.5 light years, it's orbit is in the opposite direction to all the other planets, and steeply inclined.