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Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution for Science have just announced the discovery of a very distant object in the solar system, the farthest body ever seen in our backyard space. the Earth and the Sun. The object tentatively designated by the International Astronomical Union as 2018 VG18 has also been nicknamed "Farout"
Preliminary research suggests that Farout is a planet. and the discovery was made by the same team that spotted The Goblin in October, another small world apart from our system whose discovery rekindled the theory of planet X, also called planet 9
However, "everything what we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the Sun, its approximate diameter and its color ", according to David Tholen, University of Hawaii and member of the team. He also says that Farout, because of its remoteness and very slow orbit, probably takes more than a thousand years to complete a complete tour of the Sun.
The New Dwarf Planet is made up of 120 astronomical units (AU ) of the Sun and an AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, equivalent to 150 million kilometers. Yet, Farout is more than 3.5 times farther than Pluto of the Sun (which is at 34 AU) and a little beyond Eris, which is at 96 AU. The newly discovered Goblin is also at 80 AU. It should be remembered that the NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft left the heliosphere at 120 AU – Farout distance must be, coincidentally. This is to say that the new dwarf planet is really at the edge of the solar system.
However, this does not mean that no other small world exists at this distance, or even beyond. It is thought that there are billions of comets in the Oort cloud, a "bubble" that covers the solar system and is located at around 5,000 and 1,000,000 AU from the Sun. In any case, Farout is already the most distant object ever confirmed in our system.
The team discovered the planet for the first time in November using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. After that, in December, astronomers began taking measurements with the Magellan telescope in Chile, thus confirming its existence. Observations indicate that the object has a diameter of only 500 km and that its pink color suggests that it is rich in ice on its surface.
Scott Sheppard, Carnegie researcher, explains that "2018 VG18 is much farther and slower than any other object never observed in the solar system, so it will take us a few years to fully determine how its orbit works. "However," it was found at a similar location to other extreme objects already known in the solar system, which which suggests that it could have the same type of orbit as most of them. "Yet," the body has been a catalyst for our initial badertion that there is a distant planet. " and mbadive for several hundred small grazing objects of the "AU" of this region.
This is precisely what Sheppard and his team have accurately examined objects far removed from the solar system. To find out if there is even a mbadive planet in the region (the almost Folk Planet X), as observations and simulations of orbits of known objects from the confines of the solar system strongly suggest that there is a vast and unknown planet in this region. And since this supposed planet would be far away (between hundreds and thousands of AU), it could rather alter the orbits of objects just as distant but smaller without affecting the planets of the inner solar system.
This means that more (as in The Goblin and Farout now), astronomers are more likely to detect such a mysterious planet, gathering more and more clues to search for it, then directing the powerful telescopes one day, they will be able to locate it.
Source: Space.com, Carnegie
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