New dwarf plane discovered at the edge of the solar system

A potential dwarf plane has been discovered in the second range of our solar system orbiting Neptune. Its presence that challenges the existence of a hypothetical organ known as Planet 9 or Planet X.

Sihao Cheng at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues first detected the object, known as the 2017 of201, as a bright spot in an astronomical image database from Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile.

The 2017 of201 is about 700 kilometers across – large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet as Pluto, which has a diameter about three times as large. The object is currently about 90.5 astronomical units (AU) away from us or approx. 90 times as far from Earth as the sun is.

Becuse 2017 of201’s average course around the sun is great that Neptune, that’s what is known as a trans-Neptunic object (TNO). It passes through the Kuiper belt, a disk of icy objects in the outer solar system beyond Neptune’s orbit.

The researchers looked back over 19 observations taken over seven years by Canada France Hawaii -Telescope, to decide that the nearest 2017 AF201 will come to the sun – its perihelion – is 44.5 AU, similar to Pluto’s orbit. It will be the longest from the sun is 1600 on, far outside the solar system.

This far -reaching course may be the result of a meeting with a huge planet that threw the candidate’s dwarf planet out of the solar system, the researchers say.

“It’s a really cool discovery,” says Kevin Napier at the University of Michigan. The object would go so far outside the solar system that it could interact with other stars in the galaxy as strongly as it interacts with some of the planets in our solar system, he says.

The orbiters of many extreme TNOs seem to cling to a particular orientation. This has been interpreted as evidence that the solar system contains a ninth planet hidden in the Oort cloud, a huge cloud of icy cliffs that surround the solar system. The idea is that Planet 9’s gravity pushes the TNOs into their specific circuits.

But course from 2017 AF201 not this pattern. “This object is definitely an outlier to the observed cluster,” says team member Eritas Yang at Princeton University.

Cheng and his colleagues also modeled simulations of the object’s orbit and how it could interact with Planet 9. ”In it with Planet X, the object is thrown out after a few chased millions of years, and without planet X it stays,” says Napier. “This is this not proof of planet 9.”

But device there is more data, the case is not closed, says Cheng. “I hope Planet 9 still exists because it will be more interests.”

It takes about 25,000 years to complete a course, which means that it only uses approx. 1 percent of its time close to the ground to discover it. “These things are really hard to find because they faint, and their circuits are so long and thin that you can only see that they are really close to the sun, and then they go back right back and they are invisible to us again,” says Napier.

This means that there may be hung of such items out there. Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will go online later in the year, will look deeper into space and will potentially discover many more objects like this, which should tell us more about them – and Whther Planet 9 exists Actuelly.