The hunt for Planet Nine reveals some strange, far-out objects
Astronomers hunting for Planet Nine have found some 50 new objects lying beyond the orbit of Neptune – including a few that may help them track down this elusive, distant world.
The new discoveries, described in a paper accepted to the Astronomical Journal, mark another step toward finding this mysterious giant planet, which could help rewrite our understanding of our own solar system.
In 2014, astronomers Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chadwick Trujillo of Northern Arizona University announced that they’d found an object with the most distant orbit ever observed in the solar system – a possible dwarf planet called 2012 VP113 that lay far beyond Pluto.
2012 VP113 (nicknamed “Biden”) was a baffling object, because its orbit placed it in what was thought to be a no man’s land between the Kuiper belt (the icy ring of distant debris whose largest member is Pluto) and the Oort cloud, a far-out, spherical shell of debris that scientists think surrounds the solar system.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-planet-nine-objects-snap-story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
