When the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ was first hypothesised in 2016 it was hailed as the solution to the strange orbits of far-flung icy objects and the unexplained tilt in the Solar System.

The finding came 10 years after Pluto had been unceremoniously downgraded to ‘asteroid number 134340’ and led to hopes that our star system would soon be restored to nine worlds.

Yet despite widespread searches by the most powerful telescopes, Planet Nine has never been spotted, and now astrophysicists have put forward a ‘less dramatic’ explanation.

They think that the Kuiper Belt objects are being tugged by the combined gravitational force of a rotating ring of icy chunks orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune.

When the heavy spinning disc was inputted into computer models of the Solar System it created the same gravitational pull as Planet Nine, and is a far more likely explanation for the anomaly.

The explanation has been dubbed 'the shepherding disk hypothesis.'