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AMSTERDAM The Dutch government on Friday announced new rules restricting exports of certain advanced semiconductor equipment, a move

France sees a third night of mass unrest, triggered by Tuesday's police shooting of a teenager.

Sri Lanka is seeking to restructure about $19.8 billion of local bills and bonds, equivalent to half of

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

More than 100 million people are under air quality alerts Friday from Wisconsin to Vermont and down to North Carolina, as smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to waft south, though conditions are expected to improve slowly into the weekend.

It was meant to be the year China’s economy, unshackled from the world’s strictest Covid-19 controls, roared back

The oversight board for Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Thursday said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen should be suspended from the social media site for six months for posting a video violating rules against violent threats.

Shropshire Council announces plans to buy 10 more homes for those who have fled Afghanistan.

Shorter-maturity Philippine bonds look increasingly favorable relative to longer-dated ones, aided by the central bank’s pivot to an

A man who took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol was arrested Thursday night

By Ankur Banerjee SINGAPORE Asian stocks inched higher on Friday as weak factory activity data from China stoked

The NFL has suspended three players indefinitely for violating the league’s gambling policy and a fourth was sidelined for six games