Planet Nine seems to be more mysterious than first thought. This elusive world, which has been suggested to be hiding beyond the orbit of Neptune, has been described as a "rogue planet" that was part of our solar system in the past.

According to the lead author of the study, James Vesper of the New Mexico State University, it is very plausible that Planet Nine is a captured rogue or a world that orbits around space without a host star.

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Planet Nine was first detected by Caltech researchers and in January 2016. Astronomers were able to detect an anomaly in the orbits of some space rocks in the Kuiper Belt. This was probably caused by an unknown planet orbiting the sun.

In this new study, the team carried out computer simulations involving 156 trajectories of potential encounters from rogue planets within our solar system.

 Their results revealed that in 60 percent of these encounters, an incoming rogue planet would be ejected from the solar system. The researchers added that 10 percent of these rogue planets entering our solar system could drag in one of our native planets when it departs.

Also, 40 percent of these encounters can result in the rogue world being captured by our solar system in an event known as a "soft capture" where no native planets are ejected nor replace the orbit of a native planet. P

Planet Nine is also thought to be 10 times bigger than Earth.

In January 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown from the California Institute of Technology discovered new evidence supporting the existence of Planet Nine and calculated its highly elliptical orbit and its distance from the sun at 1,000 astronomical units.

For comparison, one astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun, which is 93 million miles. Neptune is 30 AU, and Pluto is 49 AU from the sun.

These findings are presented during the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Texas.