Astronomical Journal
Volume 96, Number 4
THE LOCATION OF PLANET X
R.S. Harrington
U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, DC 20392
Received 17 May 1988; revised 12 July 1988
ABSTRACT
Planet X, if it exists at all, is most likely to be found, at present, in the region of Scorpius, with a considerably lesser likelihood that it is in Taurus.
In 1930, Tombaugh found the planet Pluto. This was the result of a systematic search initiated at Lowell Observatory as the result of predictions made by Lowell as to the positions and nature of a supposed additional planet in our solar system. At the time, Pluto was hailed as the object of that prediction, even though there were anomalies in its appearance and orbit evident right from the time of its discovery. Since then, these problems have only become more serious, and the discovery of its satellite in 1978 revealed a mass of Pluto that could not have caused any of the perturbations in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune used to predict the existence of a ninth planet. For a complete review of the discovery of Pluto and the developments leading up to the suspicion of the existence of a tenth planet, see Seidelmann and Harrington (1988).