QUESTION: Can the Hubble telescope can take pictures of the 10th missing planet in our solar system? ANSWER from Sanjay Limay on April 24, 1996: If there were a tenth planet, HST should be able to take a picture of it. However, there is no evidence anymore that there is a tenth planet in our solar system. The belief that there was a tenth planet was due to our previous inability to precisely model the motions of the outer planets. However, after the fly-bys of the outer planets (Jupiter to Neptune) by Voyager 2, we now know the masses of those planets better than we did before, and the new values are able to explain the motions of the outer planets to within the observational errors (especially for the older observations). Thus, there is no reason to invoke a large planet beyond Pluto to tug the planets to perturb their orbital motions. However, there are many small objects beyond the orbit of Pluto that have been discovered in recent years. But these newly identified members of the solar system are too small be called planets or even minor planets as they are perhaps no more than about 50 km radius.