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There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Instagram’s new Twitter competitor app “Threads” is slated to be rolled out on Thursday in the US and on Friday for the rest of the world, according to a listing spotted on Apple’s App Store. The Twitter alternative app from Instagram’s parent company Meta briefly showed up on Google Play on Saturday and was spotted by mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who flagged some of its features on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. Screenshots and some initial details revealed some of the app’s UI elements, including its login screen, which suggested an ability to log into the app with one’s Instagram account. The interface, as seen on the screenshots, also appears similar to other text-based social media apps. “Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” said the app’s App Store preview notes. “Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things – or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions, and creativity with the world.” Meta has also launched a new webpage with a countdown ahead of Threads’ release. The tech giant has been working on the app for some time now, initially under the name “Barcelona”. The Threads app was being planned for an end-of-July release, but its launch is being sped up following Twitter users expressing frustration over Mr Musk’s “rate limiting” fiasco, 9to5Mac reported. Chaos erupted on Twitter on Saturday as the company’s owner and chief technology officer Mr Musk announced new limits on the number of posts accounts can read in a day. The Tesla boss said the decision was made to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. He had previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like ChatGPT-owner OpenAI using Twitter’s data to train their AI models. Many users expressed their frustration over the weekend as they got notifications saying, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again”. The growing frustration among Twitter’s users has also led to a new surge of activity on rival social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. Threads’ rollout in this atmosphere of backlash against Twitter’s moves might see the new app get more takers. The Twitter competitor also appears to directly port over users’ Instagram followers and following lists, instead of rebuilding their communities from scratch. Read More Jack Dorsey calls for ‘open internet’ as Musk imposes new reading limits on Twitter Twitter down: Rival Mastodon sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’ Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand following Musk’s rate limits Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’