NASA needs your help to find a new planet

By: Matt Hoffman, Buzz60

NASA is looking for a new planet and they want your help finding it!

The agency believes there may be another planet beyond Neptune based on the orbits of more distant objects.

This hypothetical body is referred to as Planet 9, formerly Planet X before the demotion of Pluto to the status of dwarf planet.

NASA thinks Planet 9 could be found in images captured by their Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, but there are a whole lot of those images.

Now regular people can join the hunt through a website called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The site shows you WISE images and asks you to mark noteworthy objects within them.

UC Berkeley researcher and WISE analyst Aaron Meisner told NASA, "Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has the potential to unlock once-in-a-century discoveries and it's exciting to think they could be spotted first by a citizen scientist."

But if we do find Planet 9, we won't be visiting anytime soon. It could be twenty times farther from the sun than Neptune.