Giant Planet, yes please, thank you very much.

Already Planet Bang is exciting, but could it be something else?

Maybe I'm just too invested in the solar system having a pet work hole.

Is it Planet Nine?

Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and

astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. Yep and I'm very excited for this month's episode. We've made it,

Izzy. Finally, this month it's all about the mysterious planet nine. Yes.

Mysterious and so far undetected hypothetical ninth planet in our solar system.

But is it a planet? Is it a black hole? Is it even real? The big questions for this one.

Yeah, just taking the big questions head on. So we'll be speaking with the scientists researching Planet Nine to try and get to the bottom of all of this. And Robert Massey is

here to the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society. So Robert, where do you stand on this?

Planet, black hole, does it exist?

We don't know if it exists. I'm kind of in the cascary of I want to believe. I'd really love there to be a planet out there, let alone a black hole. And would that be incredible?

It's worth reflecting that it's not the first time that we've talked about a planet at the edge of

the solar system. And if you think about a planet at the edge of the

solar system. And if you think historically, Neptune was the expansion of the solar system

after the discovery of Uranus. And then Pluto, when that was a planet, and when Pluto was,

before it was officially downgraded, we realized it was a lot smaller than initially thought. In

the 1970s, we found a moon around round it and that meant it was a lot

smaller. And so then people started looking for what was then planet X at that time because Pluto

was still a planet. So they had planet X, Roman numeral X for the 10th planet. And that discovery,

that quest anyway, went on into the 1980s until it was ruled out. So it does come around periodically. So I have a

...