Just when you think you know all the worlds in the solar system, astronomers discover a new object that can be rewritten space map.
This cold world is temporarily called 2017, 2017, maybe Pluto – Literally, scientists mean “far away”. At its furthest moment, it is more than 1,600 times the distance of the Earth sun. At the closest point, it is still 44.5 times far away from the Earth.
What makes 2017 OF201 stand out is its very stretched path around the sun, which takes an incredible 25,000 Earth years to complete. For comparison, Pluto circles around the sun every 248 years.
How to get to this world The edge of the solar system It’s a mystery – perhaps the result of close contact with a huge planet like this Jupiter Or Neptune throws it into a wide orbit. Maybe when it first pops up, it ends up in The so-called Oort cloud Return before. Green clouds are believed to be the range of ancient, icy objects surrounding the solar system. NASA Saying clouds is still a theory because the comets there are too faint and far to be directly observed.
The International Astronomical Union’s secondary planet center, which classifies new moons and other small bodies in the solar system Announced this discovery May 21, 2017, 2017, about 435 miles to become a dwarf, and Pluto has been degraded from the ninth star in 2006, the same name is also called pluto.
“Although the advancement of telescopes has allowed us to explore distant parts of the universe,” said Sihao Cheng, a senior researcher who led the discovery. A statement“There is still a lot to discover about our own solar system.”
Mixable light speed
Jupiter designed the solar system. This is what Earth looked like when she was a child.
The composite image shows five recognized dwarf planets in the solar system and new candidates for 2017.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Sihao Cheng et al. Infographic
Together with Princeton graduate students, Zheng discovered possible dwarfs while searching for potential Planet 9, a hypothetical hidden world whose gravitational effects could lead to strange clustering of distant objects outside Neptune.
The team used a computer program to view years of space images taken by the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile and the Hawaii telescope in France, Canada. They are able to identify it by connecting the bright spots that move slowly in the sky.
These are the current orbits of Pluto, Neptune and 2017 2017.
Credit: jiaxuan li / sihao cheng infographic
But 2017 is a strange outlier in the year 2017, because it does not follow the clustering pattern of other trans objects.
One of the collaborators, Jiaxuan Li Personal website. Their Research Now available on Arxiv preprint servers.
The discovery also challenges many scientists’ concepts of the external solar system. The area outside the Kuiper belt where the object is located was previously considered empty. NASA’s new horizon survey, took pictures Pluto and its moons Since then, the distance has more than doubled in 2015, though surprisingly, it still doesn’t reach the edge of the belt.
This could mean that the spacecraft will travel billions of miles before it arrives Interstellar spaceareas no longer affected by solar radiation and particles. In 2019, New Horizon took photos of the cold red dumbbell shaped image, named arrokoththe furthest object ever made in spacecraft.
If the orbital distance of only 1% is spent in 2017 close enough to people to detect it, it could mean that something outside of the Kuiper Belt isn’t that empty after all.
“The existence of this single object indicates that there may be a hundred other objects with similar orbits and sizes,” Cheng said. “They are too far away now to detect now.”
