[HansardExpert]

> If a ninth planet exists in our solar system, scientists say this telescope would find it in its first year.

Why?

I read the article and it wasn't clear to me what makes this telescope more likely (and within a year) be able to find this infamous Planet 9 than any other attempts.

What am I missing?

[frumiousirc]

While most telescopes focus (pun intended) on seeing far, this one focuses on seeing wide and often. It will be able to survey and resurvey the same large swaths of the sky. Offline analysis will be able to detect changes between different surveys. And these differences may show objects that are too faint, or at unknown locations such as a new undiscovered solar planet.

This ability is reflected in the telescope's working title of "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope".

[reylas]

This telescope takes a complete picture of the sky every three days. This is half of the key part. The second half is that they have developed storage and software to compare each photo automatically to flag what has moved every three days. Primarily planets and asteroids would move, everything else would not.

Alerts are sent when a moving object is found for further study by humans.