American astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system, which has already been named 2017 OF201.
This object is known to have a huge orbit and a potential size, close to a dwarf planet. The discovery also points to the existence of other similar objects hidden behind Neptune’s orbit.
The team of researchers, led by Xihao Chen of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, together with colleagues from Princeton University’s Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang found, that 2017 OF201 should be similar to Pluto. It is one of the most remote facilities, detected in the solar system.
The discovery was confirmed by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union. The trans-Neptunian objects are dwarf planets, whose orbits are mostly farther from the Sun, than Neptune’s orbit.
“The object’s aphelion — the farthest point of its orbit from the Sun — is more than 1600 times the Earth’s orbit. At the same time, its perihelion — the closest point to the Sun — is 44.5 times the orbit of the Earth, which is comparable to the orbit of Pluto”, — explains Xihao Chen.
2017 OF201 is interesting, because it has highly unusual orbital characteristics and an unusually large size for a dwarf planet. This extreme orbit, which takes about 25 thousand years to complete, offers a complex history of gravitational interaction.
“It must have collided with a giant planet, which caused it to fly into a wide orbit. Perhaps its migration consisted of several stages. Perhaps this, object was first ejected into the Oort Cloud, the most remote region of our solar system, where many comets live, and then returned. Many extreme trans-Neptunian objects have orbits that appear to cluster in certain orientations, but 2017 OF 201 is different“, — says Xihao Chen.
This clustering has been interpreted as indirect evidence of the existence of the so-called Planet X in the solar system, which can gravitationally guide objects like 2017 OF 201. However the existence of 2017 OF 201 as an anomaly in this grouping could potentially cast doubt on this hypothesis.
Xihao Chen and his colleagues estimate, that the diameter of the 2017 OF 201 is about 700 km long. This makes it the second largest object with such an elongated orbit. For example, the diameter of Pluto is 2,377 km. According to the researchers, further observations with radio telescopes are needed to more accurately determine the real size of the object.
2017 OF 201 was discovered as part of a research project from the search trans-Neptunian objects and possible new planets in the solar system. This object was discovered by precisely identifying bright spots in the database of astronomical images, obtained from the Victor Blanco Telescope and the Canadian-French Hawaiian Telescope. Attempts to combine all possible groups of such spots, which apparently moved across the sky like a single trans-Neptunian object, led to the discovery of 2017 OF 201. In the end, the object was identified in 19 different exposures obtained over 7 years.
“2017 OF 201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable. The presence of this single object suggests, that there may be about a hundred other objects with similar orbits and sizes; they are just too far away to be detected now. All the data, we used to identify and describe this object, are archived and available to everyone, not just professional astronomers. This means, that revolutionary discoveries are not only available to those, with access to the world’s largest telescopes. Any researcher, student, or even amateur scientist, with the necessary tools and knowledge, could make this discovery, which underscores the value of sharing scientific resources”, — Xihao Chen emphasizes.
The results of the study are published on the preprint server arXiv
Source: SciTechDaily
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