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A team of American astronomers has discovered a dwarf planet of just 300 kilometers in diameter in the confines of the solar system. If the average distance between the Earth and the Sun is 150 million kilometers, the new object will never be less than 65 times that distance and can multiply by 2,300.
The planet with technical name abstruse of 2015 TG387, was baptized by its discoverers because it was observed a few days before Halloween.
We believe that there may be thousands of small objects such as the 2015 TG387 at the limits of the solar system, but the distance makes them very hard to find.
– Astronomer David Tholen, University of Hawaii (United States)
The diameter of Pluto, another dwarf planet much closer, is about 2,370 kilometers. El Duende was first discovered on October 13, 2015 with the help of a telescope located on the Mauna Kea Hawaiian volcano. The discovery was made public Monday in a bulletin of the International Astronomical Union.
The importance of the new dwarf planet lies in the fact that the peculiarities of its orbit support the existence of another planet much larger, of a size 10 times greater than that of the Land, located well beyond Pluto, according to the team led by Scott Sheppard. Carnegie, Washington.
The gravitational attraction of this hypothesis would explain the movements of Duende, which takes 40 000 years to go around the Sun.
Two years ago, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, of the California Institute of Technology, have already postulated the existence of this great planet, which would be the ninth of the solar system, behind Mercury, Venus, Earth , Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
They called it Planet Nine or Planet X after detecting its alleged effect on the orbits of six bodies located in the Kuiper Belt of icy objects beyond Neptune.
"Planet X seems to affect 2015 TG387 in the same way as other objects far removed from the solar system. The simulations do not show that there is another massive planet in our solar system, but they are another indication that there might be something big out there, "said the astronomer Chad Trujillo of the University of Northern Arizona.
The astronomer Guillem Anglada, who did not participate in this research, gives credibility to the new discovery awaiting publication in the journal The Astronomical Journal. "It's hard to screw up detections like this because they're easy to check," he says. Anglada, a professor at Queen Mary University in London, discovered in 2016 the planet Next habitable world close to the Earth outside the solar system. "We expect that there will be at least a few dozen objects like this planet and they will continue to find more"He predicts.
Bret Cain was born and raised in Annapolis. He studied journalism at Quinnipiac University and has 18 years of experience as a journalist. He has also written for Slate Magazine, The Hill and ABCNews.com. As a journalist for Wolf Chronicle, Bret covers national and international developments.
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