Using Voyager 1 to Detect a Superearth Sized Planet X

Are you there, Planet X? It's me, Voyager 1

Authors:

Ioro et al

Abstract:

We propose to use the navigation data of Voyager 1 collected during the latest three decades to put on the test the recently proposed hypothesis that one (or more) still unseen super-Earth(s) may lurk at about 200−250 Astronomical Units. Such a hypothetical body would perturb the range of Voyager 1 up to several hundreds of km over 30 years. Even if two-way coherent range and Doppler tracking were discontinued for Voyager 1 after the planetary flybys era due to cost reasons, it does not seems unrealistic to assume a ranging accuracy still better than 1 km. It would be fully adequate to put new, severe constraints on the existence of a hypothetical perturber with the physical and orbital characteristic recently suggested in the literature.