If you have a computer and patience, you can help Nasa look for the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’

The hunt for “Planet Nine” is intensifying, and anyone can join in.

All you need is a computer with an Internet connection, plenty of patience, and the determination to hunt for something that would be very dim and might not actually exist.

Planet Nine, sometimes referred to as Planet X, is the hypothetical planet beyond Pluto that astronomers have been buzzing about for a couple of years. If it’s there, it’s probably big - larger than Earth, perhaps a “mini-Neptune.”

A new initiative by Nasa and the University of California at Berkeley, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, is crowdsourcing the hunt for Planet Nine. It will use archived observations from Nasa’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which scanned the skies for asteroids and other faint objects. It’s possible that Planet Nine - or perhaps a “brown dwarf” star or two - is lurking in its speckled images of space.

This planet could be 500 times as far from the sun as Earth is, but it would still be part of our solar system, with a highly elliptical orbit that never takes it anywhere close to the sun. Planet Nine should not be confused with the many “exoplanets” discovered orbiting distant stars. Nor is it the planet known as Nibiru, which exists only in the imagination of people peddling pseudoscience and apocalyptic narratives about worlds in collision.

The mystery planet’s existence is inferred from the orbits of many smaller bodies in the outer solar system. They orbit the sun and cluster in a manner that suggests the possible gravitational influence of an unseen, large planet. The evidence for its existence has been getting stronger, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown said.