Tyche (hypothetical planet)
Hypothetical gas giant in the Oort cloud / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tyche /ˈtaɪki/ was a hypothetical gas giant located in the Solar System's Oort cloud, first proposed in 1999 by astrophysicists John Matese, Patrick Whitman and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.[1][2] They argued that evidence of Tyche's existence could be seen in a supposed bias in the points of origin for long-period comets. More recently, Matese[3] and Whitmire[4] re-evaluated the comet data and noted that Tyche, if it existed, would be detectable in the archive of data that was collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.[5] In 2014, NASA announced that the WISE survey had ruled out any object with Tyche's characteristics, indicating that Tyche as hypothesized by Matese, Whitman, and Whitmire does not exist.[6][7][8]