On 7^th October 1999 a small news item appeared in the inside pages of various newspapers and Internet news servers that did little more than raise a few eyebrows. An extract from MSN News stated:

"Two teams of researchers have proposed the existence of an unseen planet or a failed star circling the Sun at a distance of more than 2 trillion miles, far beyond the orbits of the nine known planets. The theory, which seeks to explain patterns in comets’ paths, has been put forward in research accepted for publication in two separate journals."

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I believe this is the precursor to something quite extraordinary, the implications of which are unknown to the many astronomers hoping to be the first to discover this planet or failed star. The basis for my belief lies far back in history, from myths and data recorded by our very earliest civilizations. This proposed synthesis of myth and modern science lead us in a remarkable direction.
 

Matese And Murray

These two astronomers have come to similar conclusions about the existence of another planet in our Solar System through work done quite independently of one another. Dr Murray places the body, larger than Jupiter, in an orbit 32,000 AU, or 2.98 trillion miles from the Sun. Meanwhile, Dr Matese considers that the planet might be a brown dwarf orbiting at 25,000 AU.

Their conclusions are drawn from their studies of the observed perturbations of the cometary cloud. In other words, the long-period comets’ trajectories into the inner Solar system are non-random and best explained by the gravitational effect of a massive body sweeping through the Oort Cloud, the spherical field of comets wrapping around our star system.