The Discovery of Ammonite May Be the Key to a Hidden World

Stuff in space can't fly around in circles on its own. It's Newton's first law: objects move in a straight line unless something with enough gravitational force pulls it into a curved path. That's what was odd about the discovery of Sedna…

By David Sussin

If an object in space travels in an orbit, it's got to be orbiting something.

Stuff in space can't fly around in circles on its own.

It's Newton's first law: objects move in a straight line unless something with enough gravitational force pulls it into a curved path.

That's what was odd about the discovery of Sedna.

Astronomers found the object in 2003, when they were searching for distant objects beyond Pluto. There was this very distant, slow moving object, roughly 8 billion miles away -- three times farther than Pluto.

It was so far away, they didn't believe what they were seeing. It looked like a glitch. It sure wasn't on any map. But over the course of several nights, they confirmed it was there.

And the odd thing? It wasn't moving in a straight line. Something had caused it to settle into a curved path. It had been orbiting in deep space since the beginnings of our solar system. But orbiting what, exactly…?

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They named it "Sedna" after the Inuit goddess of the sea -- an icy, remote character. When they calculated the object's orbit, they found it was locked in an 11,000-year loop, pulled in our direction by the Sun.

But planets that orbit the sun remain close. Sedna is 8 billion miles away. What other massive object pulled it so far afield?

For most objects orbiting the far reaches of our solar system, the answer is Neptune. But in the case of Sedna, Neptune's gravitational force doesn't reach anywhere near it. There had to be something else.

In 2012, another distant object was discovered that gave astronomers a clue. The object was named VP113, and it travelled a similar, stretched orbit. The vast distance of this "stretch" is truly mind boggling. Like Sedna, VP113 gets as close as 8 billion miles away. But at its most distant, it's as far as 42 billion miles away.

By comparison, if you got in your Toyota RAV4 and drove a billion miles, it would take you 2,000 years to get there. You would die, and there would still be over 1,900 years left in the trip. Just saying, these are extreme distances.

What is out there with enough gravitational pull to create these stretched orbits?

In 2016, planetary scientists at Caltech published a paper that answered the question. There must be a Planet Nine. This would be a super-Earth, ten times the size of our planet. It would be far beyond Pluto and Neptune, in an unimaginably remote region of space. And its existence would explain the highly eccentric orbits of Sedna and VP113.

From that moment on, the hunt was on for Planet Nine. It's been one of the most ambitious modern astronomical searches. An impressive amount of technology has been brought to bear.

Including the Dark Energy Survey in Chile -- among the most powerful wide-field camera in the world. The DES can detect objects as faint as 24th magnitude, which would be like spotting a candle flame on the Moon from the Earth.

Astronomers also used the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Subaru can detect objects as far as 1,000 astronomical units away, well within the range Planet Nine is predicted to exist.

Unfortunately, despite all the technology and expense, no one has ever found a planet that fits the bill.

Maybe it isn't there at all. If it was, we'd expect to find many more of these orbiting objects affected by Planet Nine's gravitation.

There would be what's called "orbital clustering", or a whole group of distant objects in space with similar paths. Every simulation done with Planet Nine indicates this orbital clustering should exist. There should be more "Sedna's".

In fact, there has been a strange gap where Sedna like objects have never been found. There's a zone between distant orbits, somewhere between 50 and 75 Astronomical Units away, we would expect objects to be discovered.

That's what makes announcement from the FOSSIL project (Formation of the Outer Solar System, and Ice Legacy), published in May of this year, so exciting. They found one. And it's exactly in this mystery gap.

The FOSSIL project is a collaboration of 16 different scientific institutions and universities, and over thirty astrophysicists and astronomers from around the world. The team used the Subaru Telescope and its Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), a cutting-edge wide-field camera, one of the most powerful tools in the world for surveying deep space.

And they found another object with a Sedna-like orbit. They call it "Ammonite", or officially KQ13, but we'll stick with Ammonite. Its orbit stays far beyond Neptune and follows a long, stretched-out path around the Sun, getting only as close as 66 AU, or around 6 billion miles. Which exactly fills that strange gap, completing the picture of the outer solar system.

Computer simulations reveal Ammonite has been in this stable, eccentric orbit for a staggering 4.5 billion years. All that time, it's never been affected by Neptune or any chaos in our solar system. Whatever drives its orbit, it's been there since our own solar system began.

The orbit of Ammonite is different enough from Sedna to suggest Planet Nine may be farther out than we thought, maybe as far as 500 AU. It helps narrow down where to look.

The idea of a massive mystery planet lurking outside our solar system attracts ominous theories and stories. Author Zecharia Stichin wrote decades ago about a rogue world called Nibiru that was home to the Anunnaki, a race of extraterrestrial beings.

According to Sitchin, Nibiru follows a highly elliptical orbit and passes through the solar system every 3,600 years. Could this be Planet Nine?

Others link Planet Nine to a "Black Knight Satellite", an alien probe surveilling Earth. Is Ammonite a remnant from this alien megastructure, doomed to orbit in deep space for all time?

There has been much crazy - and maybe not so crazy - speculation about what Planet Nine might be.

But the discovery of Ammonite, with its eccentric orbit made stable by some mysterious gravitational force, tells us one thing for certain: there is something out there.

Sources:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02595-7

https://www.fossil-survey.org/

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