Move over Pluto, there’s a new dwarf planet in the solar system.
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It’s located at a distance of more than 9.6 billion miles (15.4 billion kilometers) away from the Sun, and it’s 3 times more far-flung than Pluto. It is estimated that its diameter is between 500 and 1000 kilometers, more than half as small as Pluto, and comparable to the width of Texas.
The announcement was made yesterday near Washington, D.C., at the 47th annual meeting for the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. Sheppard refers to them as “inner Oort cloud objects”, telling Science that their orbits can not be explained “from what we know about the solar system”.
Models for Solar System formation suggest that such objects were probably not created in these weird, eccentric orbits.
“We’re doing the widest, deepest survey ever for outer solar system objects”, Sheppard reported.
Scientists will continue monitoring the new object’s orbit over the next year.
This discovery gives us a rare glimpse into the outer fringes of our Solar System.
Regardless of which category it falls into, “the discovery of V774104 is more proof that the solar system is bigger than we thought”, said Joseph Burns, an engineering and astronomy professor at Cornell University, according to the AFP.
Astronomer Scott Sheppard and his colleagues discovered V774104 in mid-October using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. If its orbit brings it to within 50 AU, it will be classified as a scattered Kuiper Belt Object. They were hunting for distant objects orbiting the Sunday. However, it’s still close enough to the sun to possibly not be a part of the Oort Cloud.
Japan’s 8.2-meter infrared Subaru Telescope, based on the summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, found the dwarf planet.
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One explanation is they’ve been perturbed and pulled to their trajectories that are unusual with a passing planet – maybe one that was expelled from our Solar System early. “This is because numerous inner Oort Cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology”. They are termed as “inner Oort cloud objects” by Sheppard just to be able to separate them from icy Kuiper Belt objects.
