He notes that, if the brightness of Tyche is close to the bright end of the prediction by Matese and Whitmire, it should have had a good chance to be discovered by now. If it’s at the darker end, even WISE may not be able to detect it, and the case may remain open for some time to come. Wright's hope is that it will take a couple of years to complete the mapping of WISE data at the level of sensitivity and precision sufficient to detect something like Tyche, but he also adds "one never knows how long a novel task will take." So, the bottom line is that we will have to wait for a while just to hear if WISE has seen anything.
One thing worth noting about the analysis done by Matese and Whitmire is the relatively small number of comets studied in their report. To be sure, they did study all the comets from the Outer Oort Cloud known to us, but 102 comets are just not enough to make a statistical signal stand out significantly above the noise. For example, the bias found in the study means that they found only about 5 too many comets with low orbital tilts when the 102 comets are sorted into 5 bins between 0 and 90 degree inclinations. The study also indicates that there are several possible fits to the common orbital plane shared by these Outer Oort Cloud comets, so the orbital constraints for this new planet are also not very tight.
The new study is definitely sound science, and it is an extremely careful analysis of cometary orbits that shows interesting hints of something at play; however, the evidence for a new planet is not very strong, and the authors are unable to pinpoint where in the sky Tyche is.
At the close of the interview, Ned Wright of WISE summed up the current situation in one sentence; “No, we have not found a new planet.”
