Latest news with #dwarfplanet
Forbes
7 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
New Pluto-Like Planet Discovered In Solar System — What To Know
Astronomers have found a distant celestial body — potentially a dwarf planet — orbiting the sun from more than twice as far as Pluto. Found by astronomers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, it's one of the most distant solar system bodies observed with optical telescopes. It takes 25,000 years to orbit the sun — and it could be the first of many new objects to be found in the outer solar system. This is an artist's concept of a craggy piece of solar system debris that belongs to a class of ... More bodies called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2017 OF201 is estimated to be 435 miles (700 kilometers) in diameter. That's smaller than Pluto's 1,477 miles (2,377 kilometers), but if its size is confirmed using radio telescopes, 2017 OF201 will become the largest object in the outer solar system found in more than a decade. It's classed as an 'extreme' trans-Neptunian object, which is an icy body orbiting beyond Neptune in the solar system. The largest TNOs known are Eris, followed by Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Gonggong. Researchers identified it in 19 different exposures captured over seven years by the Dark Energy Camera (on the summit of Cerro Tololo, Chile) and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island). Image showing the current location of Pluto, Neptune, and 2017 OF201. 2017 OF201 is a rare object because of its size, but also its extreme orbit. 'The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the sun — is more than 1,600 times that of the Earth's orbit,' said Sihao Cheng at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences. 'Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit.' It takes 2017 OF201 about 25,000 years to complete one orbit of the sun, which suggests a chaotic past. 'It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,' said Yang. "It's possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back." 2017 OF201 exists at the edge of the solar system in what's known as the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was thought that the Kuiper Belt was largely empty of large objects — but 2017 OF201 indicates that is not the case. That's underscored by the fact that 2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to the inner solar system to be detectable. 'The 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 now,' said Cheng. 'Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system.' In September 2004, scientists announced that they had uncovered 11 new objects beyond the accepted edge of the Kuiper Belt. They were found in alcluster while using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to find new targets for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which left Earth in 2006 and conducted the only ever flyby of Pluto in 2015 before entering the Kuiper Belt.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Planet Nine? Not quite, but some astronomers think they've spotted a new dwarf planet
A possible new dwarf planet has been discovered at the edge of our solar system, so far-flung that it takes around 25,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The object, known as 2017 OF201, was found by researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University who were searching for 'Planet Nine,' a hypothetical planet larger than Earth that is thought to orbit beyond Neptune. Some astronomers theorize that a mysterious ninth planet, which so far remains undetected, could explain an unusual clustering of objects and other anomalies observed in the outer solar system. In searching for the elusive Planet Nine, researchers instead turned up a different resident in our cosmic backyard. 'It's not very different from how Pluto was discovered,' said Sihao Cheng, a member at the Institute for Advanced Study who led the research team. 'This project was really an adventure.' If confirmed, the newfound dwarf planet would be what Cheng calls an 'extreme cousin' of Pluto. The findings were published on the preprint website arXiv and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Cheng and his colleagues estimate that 2017 OF201 measures about 435 miles across — significantly smaller than Pluto, which measures nearly 1,500 miles across. A dwarf planet is classified as a celestial body that orbits the sun that has enough mass and gravity to be mostly round, but unlike other planets, has not cleared its orbital path of asteroids and other objects. Eritas Yang, one of the study's co-authors and a graduate student at Princeton University, said that one of 2017 OF201's most interesting features is its extremely elongated orbit. At its farthest point from the sun, the object is more than 1,600 times more distant than the Earth is to the sun. The researchers found the dwarf planet candidate by meticulously sifting through a huge data set from a telescope in Chile that was scanning the universe for evidence of dark energy. By cobbling together observations over time, the researchers identified a moving object with migrations that followed a clear pattern. 2017 OF201 is likely one of the most distant visible objects in the solar system, but its discovery suggests there could be other dwarf planets populating that region of space. 'We were using public data that has been there for a long time,' said Jiaxuan Li, a study co-author and a graduate student at Princeton University. 'It was just hidden there.' Li said the object is close to the sun at the moment, which means the researchers need to wait about a month before they can conduct follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes. The scientists are also hopeful that they can eventually secure some time to study the object with the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. In the meantime, Cheng said he hasn't given up searching for Planet Nine. The new discovery, however, may throw a wrench into some long-standing theories of the planet's existence. The hypothesis behind Planet Nine is that a planet several times the size of Earth in the outer solar system could explain why a group of icy objects seem to have unusually clustered orbits. 'Under the influence of Planet Nine, all objects that do not have this specific orbital geometry will eventually become unstable and get kicked out of the solar system,' Yang said. 2017 OF201's elongated orbit makes it an outlier from the clustered objects, but Yang's calculations suggest that the orbit of 2017 OF201 should remain stable over roughly the next billion years. In other words, 2017 OF201 likely would not be able to remain if Planet Nine does exist. But Yang said more research is needed, and the discovery of the new dwarf planet candidate is not necessarily a death knell for Planet Nine. For one, the simulations only used one specific location for Planet Nine, but scientists don't all agree on where the hypothetical planet lurks — if it's there at all. Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, proposed the existence of Planet Nine in a study published with his Caltech colleague Mike Brown in 2016. He said the discovery of 2017 OF201 doesn't prove or disprove the theory. The objects in the outer solar system that are likely to show a footprint of Planet Nine's gravity, Batygin said, are the ones where the closest points on their orbits around the sun are still distant enough that they don't strongly interact with Neptune. 'This one, unfortunately, does not fall into that category,' Batygin told NBC News. 'This object is on a chaotic orbit, and so when it comes to the question of 'What does it really mean for Planet Nine?' The answer is not very much, because it's chaotic.' Batygin said he was excited to see the new study because it adds more context to how objects came to be in the outer solar system, and he called the researchers' efforts mining public data sets 'heroic.' Cheng, for his part, said he hasn't abandoned hope of finding Planet Nine. 'This whole project started as a search for Planet Nine, and I'm still in that mode,' he said. 'But this is an interesting story for scientific discovery. Who knows if Planet Nine exists, but it can be interesting if you're willing to take some risks.' This article was originally published on
Malay Mail
31-05-2025
- General
- Malay Mail
Potential dwarf planet 2017 OF201 discovered in solar system's distant reaches
WASHINGTON, June 1 — Scientists have identified an object about 435 miles (700 km) wide inhabiting the frigid outer reaches of our solar system that might qualify as a dwarf planet, spotting it as it travels on a highly elongated orbital path around the sun. 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 and a region called the Kuiper Belt may not be deserted, as long thought. The Kuiper Belt is populated by numerous icy bodies. Given the name 2017 OF201, the object falls into a category called trans-Neptunian objects that orbit the sun at a distance beyond that of Neptune. The object takes about 25,000 years to complete a single orbit of the sun, compared to 365 days for Earth to do so. The researchers said 2017 OF201 was identified in observations by telescopes in Chile and Hawaii spanning seven years. 'It 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,' 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. Its size is estimated to be a bit smaller than Ceres, which is the smallest of the solar system's five recognized 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). The mass of 2017 OF201 is estimated to be about 20,000 times smaller than Earth's and 50 times smaller than Pluto's. 'We don't know the shape yet. Unfortunately it is too far away and it is a bit difficult to resolve it with telescopes,' Cheng said. 'Its composition is totally unknown yet, but likely similar to other icy bodies.' The discovery was announced by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union, an international organization of astronomers, and detailed in a study posted on the open-access research site arXiv. The study has not yet been peer reviewed. Earth's 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, meaning 90.5 times as far as Earth. 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. 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. 'We still don't know much about the solar system far away because currently it is difficult to directly see things beyond about 150 astronomical units,' Cheng said. 'The 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.' The five dwarf planets recognized 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. The organization defines a planet and a dwarf planet differently. A planet must orbit its host star - in our case the sun - 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. 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. This is because 2017 OF201's orbit does not follow the pattern exhibited by other known trans-Neptunian objects, which tend to cluster together. Some scientists had hypothesized that such clustering was caused by the gravity of a yet-to-be discovered planet. 'The existence of 2017 OF201 as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis,' Cheng said. — Reuters
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists found a possible new dwarf planet — it could spell bad news for Planet 9 fans
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A potential new dwarf planet has been discovered in the outer reaches of the solar system, and its existence poses the greatest challenge yet to the hypothesis that a ninth planet lurks far from the sun. "We were very excited to discover 2017 OF201 because it was not expected at all," study leader Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told "It's very rare to discover an object both large and with an exotic orbit." "The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the sun – is more than 1,600 times that of the Earth's orbit," Cheng explained in a statement. "Meanwhile its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit." We're learning more and more about the outer solar system. Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt; a ring of icy cometary nuclei and planetesimals dominated by Pluto and Charon. The Kuiper Belt begins about 30 astronomical units (AU) from the sun (one AU is the distance of Earth from the sun), its inner edge guarded by Neptune, and extends out to 50 AU. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt. Meanwhile, the twin Voyager spacecraft have already sped through the Kuiper Belt and have entered a realm called the Scattered Disk, which is thought to go all through way out to more than 1,000 AU and is home to icy bodies on highly elongated and highly inclined orbits. These objects were literally scattered in the region through gravitational interactions with Neptune, and have had their orbits further modified via torques induced by the gravity of passing stars, or the "galactic tide" (the overall gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy). Beyond the Scattered Disk is the Oort Cloud, which is an immense volume of space that possibly stretches up to a light-year from the sun and is the source of long-period comets. However, much about the Scattered Disk is still unknown, and besides those long-period comets that venture this way every now and then, no Oort Cloud object has ever been seen — they are too far away and too small. This is why every discovery of a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) on a greatly elongated orbit is vital for piecing together the mystery of the outer solar system. Around 5,000 TNOs have been discovered until now, but the latest discovery may be one of the most important. Known as 2017 OF201, it is currently 90.5 AU away from the sun, but its orbit brings it as close as 4.14 billion miles (6.66 billion kilometers) from our star and as far away as a whopping 157 billion miles (244 billion kilometers). from the sun. For the vast majority of its 24,256-year orbit, 2017 OF201 is too far away to be seen with current telescopes; it could only be discovered because its last perihelion came in 1930, and that it's still relatively close. The object's last perihelion also came, coincidentally, during the same year that Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto with a 13-inch (330mm) telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Would it have been possible for Tombaugh to have also found 2017 OF201? Probably not — at magnitude +20.1, this object would have been four magnitudes fainter than Pluto, and it is even fainter today. Fortunately, telescopic technology has come a long way in the past 95 years, with deep surveys that can capture the passage of a faint object. For example, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has identified about 800 TNOs — and that's even though DES is ostensibly a cosmological survey. In the same vein, Cheng, along with Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang of Princeton University, have been scrutinizing observations made by the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) on the Victor M. Blanco 13-foot (4-meter) telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. They discovered 2017 OF201 in archive data going back to 2017 from DECaLS, and also spotted it in old data dating from 2011–12 captured by the 11.7-foot) (3.58-meter) Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Based on its brightness and its expected albedo of 0.15 (meaning it would reflect just 15% of the sunlight incident upon it), Cheng's team calculated that 2017 OF201 is probably about 435 miles (700 kilometers)) across. This would make it the second largest object found on such an elongated orbit. Although it is substantially smaller than Pluto, which is 1,477 miles (2,377 km) across, 2017 OF201 is nevertheless large enough to be classified as a dwarf planet. However, 2017 OF201's existence contradicts the Planet Nine hypothesis, based on our best guess as to Planet Nine's orbit. Planet Nine is a concept that was introduced in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin to explain a perceived clustering of the orbits of many extreme TNOs. The gravity of Planet Nine, which is speculated to be a super-Earth or modest ice giant, would be influencing the orbits of extreme TNOs — or so the hypothesis goes. Yet, the orbit of 2017 OF201 is not clustered with the others. "Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this," Jiaxuan Li said in the statement. In our e-mail interview with Cheng, he laid out the repercussions that this could have for the existence of Planet Nine's orbit. "Planet Nine does allow for extreme TNOs to have unclustered orbits, but those orbits are not stable," he said. The timescale in which Planet Nine would render 2017 OF201's orbit unstable, and kick it out of the solar system, is in the region of 100 million years. However, the process of placing 2017 OF201 in its current orbit, through gravitational interactions with Neptune that pushed 2017 OF201 out of the Kuiper Belt — followed by nudges from the galactic tide — takes billions of years. It's possible that 2017 OF201 has only recently arrived in its current orbit, which would mean Planet Nine might not have had time to disrupt its orbit yet. "One important thing is to see if the orbit of our object is stable," Cheng said. "I think, based on analytical criteria, our object is at the boundary between stable and unstable, so further investigation with more comprehensive simulations is needed to definitively rule out the Planet Nine hypothesis." Related Stories: — Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart — Hubble Telescope discovers a new '3-body problem' puzzle among Kuiper Belt asteroids — 2nd Kuiper Belt? Our solar system may be much larger than thought Intriguingly, 2017 OF201 is probably not alone in the outer solar system. It's purely by chance that it happens to be close enough to be detectable — for 99% of its 24,256-year orbit it is too far away to be seen. "2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable," said Cheng. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbits and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now. Just think of that: There could be hundreds of dwarf planets in the outermost reaches of the solar system. "Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system," said Cheng. A pre-print of a paper describing the discovery is available on arXiv.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Potential discovery of new dwarf planet adds wrinkle to Planet Nine theory
A team of scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Natural Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey, might have found a new dwarf planet, potentially leading to more evidence of a theoretical super-planet. The scientists announced in a news release that they have found a trans-Neptune Object(TNO), code-named 2017OF201, located past the icy and desolate region of the Kuplier Belt. The TNO, which are described as minor planets that orbit the sun at a greater distance than Neptune, were found on the edge of our solar system. While there are plenty of other TNOs in the solar system, what makes 2017OF201 special is its large size and extreme orbit. Nasa Looking For Ways To Destroy Asteroid That Could Strike Earth, Kill City One of the team leads, Sihao Cheng, along with Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, made the discovery. Read On The Fox News App The team used advanced computational methods to identify the object's distinctive trajectory pattern in the sky. "The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times that of the Earth's orbit," Cheng said in the release. "Meanwhile, its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the Sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit." 2017OF201 takes about 25,000 years to orbit the sun, making Yang suggest that "It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit." Newly Discovered Asteroid Turns Out To Be Tesla Roadster Launched Into Space Cheng also added that there may have been more than one step in its migration. "It's possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back," Cheng said. This discovery has significant implications for the current understanding of the layout of our outer solar system. According to NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 announced research that provided evidence for a planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth in the outer solar system. However, the existence of Planet X or Planet Nine is strictly theoretical as neither astronomer has actually observed such a planet. The theory puts the planet at around the same size as Neptune, far past Pluto somewhere near the Kuiper Belt, where 2017OF201 was located. If it exists, it is theorized to have a mass of up to 10 times as much as Earth's with a distance of up to 30 times further than Neptune to the Sun. It would take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the Sun. However, the area beyond the Kuiper Belt, where the object is located, had previously been thought to be essentially empty, but the team's discovery suggests that this is not so. Cheng said in the release that 2017OF201 only has about 1% of its orbit visible to us. "Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system," Cheng said. NASA mentioned that if Planet Nine exists, it could help explain the unique orbits of some smaller objects in the distant Kuiper Belt. As of now, Planet Nine remains all but a theory, but the existence of this far-off world rests on gravitational patterns in the outer solar article source: Potential discovery of new dwarf planet adds wrinkle to Planet Nine theory
