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G_j

(40,366 posts)
Wed Mar 26, 2014, 04:41 PM Mar 2014

Dwarf planet stretches Solar System's edge


Icy body found far beyond Pluto raises questions about cosmic history.
Alexandra Witze

26 March 2014

http://www.nature.com/news/dwarf-planet-stretches-solar-system-s-edge-1.14921

The Solar System just got a lot more far-flung. Astronomers have discovered1 a probable dwarf planet that orbits the Sun far beyond Pluto, in the most distant trajectory known.


Together with Sedna, a similar extreme object discovered a decade ago2, the find is reshaping ideas about how the Solar System came to be. “It goes to show that there’s something we don’t know about our Solar System, and it’s something important,” says co-discoverer Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii. “We’re starting to get a taste of what’s out beyond what we consider the edge.”

Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, report the finding today in Nature.

“This is a great discovery,” says Michael Brown, a planetary astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We’ve been searching for more objects like Sedna for more than 10 years now.” Finding another one like it reduces the chances that Sedna is a fluke, he says. But astronomers now have to come up with ideas to explain how these objects remain tightly gravitationally bound to the Sun when they orbit so far away.

The newfound object's official name is 2012 VP113, but the discovery team calls it VP for short, or just 'Biden' — after US Vice-President Joe Biden. In several years time, after observations have pinned down its orbit, the scientists will submit a name for consideration by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization in charge of celestial nomenclature.

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.16437.1395847010!/image/1.14921b.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_300/1.14921b.jpg
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Dwarf planet stretches Solar System's edge (Original Post) G_j Mar 2014 OP
They don't call it the Kuiper Belt for nothing. longship Mar 2014 #1
They classify this as part of the Oort cloud muriel_volestrangler Mar 2014 #3
Most likely the wrath of Pluto! RedCloud Mar 2014 #2
... RainDog Mar 2014 #4

longship

(40,416 posts)
1. They don't call it the Kuiper Belt for nothing.
Wed Mar 26, 2014, 04:47 PM
Mar 2014

There's a lotta stuff out there. And don't get me started about the Oort Cloud, which lies beyond.

R&K

muriel_volestrangler

(101,144 posts)
3. They classify this as part of the Oort cloud
Wed Mar 26, 2014, 07:21 PM
Mar 2014

It's close to perihelion now (that was at 80 AU, in 1979; now it's at 83 AU). But it goes out to 446 AU, so it spends most of its time a lot further away than it is now. And since Sedna is similar (it goes even farther out), the chances are there's a lot of similar bodies far out on their orbits now, and we've just found a couple that are briefly at their closest.

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