WASHINGTON: Scientists have discovered a strange new object far beyond Neptune, in one of the coldest and most distant parts of our solar system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The object, named 2017 OF201, is icy, very far away, and possibly large enough to be called a dwarf planet. It takes about 25,000 years to go around the sun just once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Researchers say it\u2019s one of the most distant things we\u2019ve ever seen in space \u2014 and it could be a clue that many more hidden worlds are still waiting to be found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The researchers called it one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system and said its existence indicates that a vast expanse of space beyond the outermost planet Neptune \u2013 and a region called the Kuiper Belt \u2013 may not be deserted, as long thought. The Kuiper Belt is populated by numerous icy bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The object falls into a category called trans-Neptunian objects that orbit the sun at a distance beyond that of Neptune. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The researchers said 2017 OF201 was identified in observations by telescopes in Chile and Hawaii spanning seven years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. Its orbit is very wide and eccentric, which means it experienced an interesting orbital migration path in the past,\u201d said astrophysicist Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who led the study with collaborators Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, graduate students at Princeton University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its size is estimated to be a bit smaller than Ceres, which is the smallest of the solar system\u2019s five recognised dwarf planets and has a diameter of about 590 miles (950 km). Pluto, the largest of those dwarf planets, has a diameter of about 1,477 miles (2,377 km).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mass of 2017 OF201 is estimated to be about 20,000 times smaller than Earth\u2019s and 50 times smaller than Pluto\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know the shape yet. Unfortunately it is too far away and it is a bit difficult to resolve it with telescopes,\u201d Cheng said. \u201cIts composition is totally unknown yet, but likely similar to other icy bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The discovery was announced by the Minor Planet Centre of the International Astronomical Union, an international organisation of astronomers, and detailed in a study posted on the open-access research site arXiv. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earth\u2019s orbital distance from the sun is called an astronomical unit. 2017 OF201 is currently located at a distance of 90.5 astronomical units from the sun \u2013 meaning 90.5 times as far as Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But at its furthest point during its orbit, 2017 OF201 is more than 1,600 astronomical units from the sun, while the closest point on its orbit is about 45 astronomical units. That means it sometimes is closer to the sun than Pluto, whose orbital distance ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units as it travels an elliptical path around the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The researchers suspect that the extreme orbit of 2017 OF201 may have been caused by a long-ago close encounter with the gravitational influence of a giant planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe still don\u2019t know much about the solar system far away because currently it is difficult to directly see things beyond about 150 astronomical units,\u201d Cheng said. \u201cThe presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size. They are just too far away to be detectable right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The five dwarf planets recognised by the International Astronomical Union are, in order of distance from the sun: Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter; then Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, which all orbit beyond Neptune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The organisation defines a planet and a dwarf planet differently. A planet must orbit its host star \u2013 in our case, the sun \u2013 and must be mostly round and sufficiently large that its gravitational strength clears away any other objects of similar size near its orbit. A dwarf planet must orbit the sun and be mostly round but it has not cleared its orbit of other objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cheng said the discovery of 2017 OF201 has implications for hypotheses involving the potential existence of a ninth planet in our solar system, dubbed Planet X or Planet Nine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is because 2017 OF201\u2019s orbit does not follow the pattern exhibited by other known trans-Neptunian objects, which tend to cluster together. Some scientists had hypothesised that such clustering was caused by the gravity of a yet-to-be-discovered planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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WASHINGTON: Scientists have discovered a strange new object far beyond Neptune, in one of the coldest and most distant parts of our solar system. The object, named 2017 OF201, is icy, very far away, and possibly large enough to be called a dwarf planet. It takes about 25,000 years to go around the sun just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","inline_featured_image":false,"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_3859443944190656_798604363342440":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sci-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6111,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6109\/revisions\/6111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}