[perihelions]

To be fair, this is also more or less how we found Neptune. Boring, simple explanations are often the right ones. Not every horse is secretly a zebra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune

- "The planet Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet were made on the night of September 23–24, 1846,[1] at the Berlin Observatory, by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle (assisted by Heinrich Louis d'Arrest), working from Le Verrier's calculations. It was a sensational moment of 19th-century science, and dramatic confirmation of Newtonian gravitational theory. In François Arago's apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet "with the point of his pen"."

[notresidenter]

You're right, but with Neptune, they were able to empirically verify that: oh, there's a planet there. Here's they've made the calculations because those (afaik) fit in the current model and they've concluded: oh, there's (most likely) a planet there.

They are only half way there (afaik, but I could have misunderstood their point)