Are There Terrestrial Planets Lurking in the Outer Solar System?

Abstract

Abstract Motivated by recent measurements of the free-floating-planet mass function at terrestrial masses, we consider the possibility that the solar system may have captured a terrestrial planet early in its history. We show that ∼1.2 captured free-floating planets with mass strictly greater than that of Mars may exist in the outer solar system, with a median predicted distance of ∼1400 au. If we consider a logarithmic bin centered on the mass of Mars, rather than a cutoff, we find that ∼2.7 captured free-floating planets with mass comparable to Mars may exist in the outer solar system. We derive an expectation value of ∼0.9 for the number of captured free-floating planets with mass comparable to that of Mars (∼1.4 for mass comparable to that of Mercury) that are currently brighter than the 10 yr coadded point-source detection limits of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Blind shift-and-stack searches could potentially enable the detection of such a planet if it is currently in the Southern sky. The theoretical argument presented here does not rely on the existence of posited patterns in the orbital elements of small bodies in and beyond the Kuiper Belt, in contrast with other hypothetical outer-solar-system planets motivated in recent years.