Astronomers announced the discovery of the most distant space object ever seen in the Solar System, an icy world that is 103 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, beyond the Kuiper Belt.
location of this object, which is located within the inner margins of the outer Solar System, makes it the most distant known so far as it breaks the record previously held by the dwarf planet Eris, which is 97 times the Sun-Earth distance .
The star, designated V774101, is between 500 and a thousand kilometers in diameter, said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, to present the findings at a meeting of planetary sciences the American Astronomical Society.
The object was located about 15 thousand 500 million kilometers in the Oort Cloud, which is three times farther away than Pluto, and just its extreme position the body might be important scientific, but it will take at least one year so that it can determine its orbit.
Scientists estimate that V774101 could eventually join an emerging class of objects from the end of the solar system orbits whose strange point to the influence Wild hypothetical planets or nearby stars.
Astronomers have not followed the newly discovered object long enough to know its full orbit, but there is a possibility that travel much closer to the Sun than the current distance , which would facilitate their work.
“There is no reason to feel satisfied yet,” said Michael Brown, planetary scientist at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a report of the journal Science.
However, this discovery gives a rare glimpse into the periphery of the solar system. Only two worlds are known in the inner Oort cloud: an object called Sedna and another known as 2012 VP 113
Neither Sedna or VP 113 is closer to the Sun, and if the newly discovered world does not. then it will join two other fascinating objects that reside in the Oort cloud.
But if the object moves closer to the Sun, crossing the Kuiper Belt, will join the ranks of many other people in this region, whose orbits are particularly widespread due to the gravitational influence of Neptune.
The object was discovered through the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the researchers plan to look again next week using the Magellan telescopes in Chile, and then in a year to calculate its orbit. bogus=”1″
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