“If it never gets near Neptune that would make the object very interesting as its orbit would be unperturbed by the giant planets and thus allow us to understand the dynamics of the outer solar system”, Sheppard wrote in an email.
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Astronomers say they’ve identified the most distant celestial object in our solar system – a speck of light more than three times farther out than Pluto, called V774104.
The object was reported on 10th November by Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.
The object remains unclassified, cataloged as V774104, and it could be one of the more exciting finds in years – or it could be just another rock.
Astronomers announced the object’s discovery Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Maryland.
Astronomers believe the frozen object inhabits the inner fringes of the Oort cloud, a largely theoretical region that demarks the boundary of the solar system and is only loosely controlled by the sun’s gravitational pull. Objects in this primordial realm follow orbits that have remained undisturbed for several billion years.
Astronomers do not yet know enough about this object to determine what its full orbit path is. Two known objects lie in the inner Oort cloud: Sedna, discovered by Michael Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues, and another one called 2012 VP113, popularly nicknamed “Biden” discovered by Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. This swath of space, which contains thousands of tiny planets, is 40 to 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth. “We only just found this object a few weeks ago”.
The former record holder for the most distant object was dwarf planet Eris, which is 96 astronomical units from the Sunday. Alternatively, V774104’s orbit could see it travel even further from the Sunday.
Joseph Burns, an astronomy professor at Cornell University, said Wednesday that this discovery is one more piece of evidence that the Solar System is much larger than we had thought.
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The new object could be in the same class as mysterious dwarf planet Sedna, discovered in 2003.
