New most distant body in the Solar system identified

The new object is actually located inside the Oort Cloud, and one the edge of the Kuiper Belt, which is where you can find the dwarf planet Eris and also Pluto.

According to NPR, the planet is roughly 100 times farther than Earth is from the Sun, and is estimated to be up to 600 miles across.

“We don’t know of any other objects that are this far away from the sun”, Sheppard said. The red dwarf is much cooler and fainter than the sun, but the planet orbits so close that surface temperatures can reach 260C.

It’s possible the mysterious object hasn’t been disturbed for 4.5 billion years, untouched since the solar system’s earliest beginnings. He said, “We can’t explain these objects’ orbits from what we know about the solar system”. Objects in this primordial realm follow orbits that have remained undisturbed for several billion years. Joseph Burns, Irving Porter Church professor of engineering and astronomy, says the new discovery is yet another piece of evidence that the solar system is larger than previously thought. “We just know it’s the most distant object known”, he said.

Using a Subaru telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, scientists were hoping to catch a glimpse of new objects orbiting the Sun, when they discovered a tiny spot of light. He reported his finding at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in National Harbor, Maryland.

Up to now, astronomers still can not explain these far-flung icy objects beyond the Kuiper belt, because way out in the Oort Cloud, the known planetary laws and structures do not really apply. Eris has a perihelion of 37 astronomical units (AU) and an aphelion of 97 AU. Neptune is, on average, 30.1 AU from the sun; Pluto orbits between 29 and 49 AU.

V774104 was spotted by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Sedna and 2012 VP113 never come within 50 AU of the sun during their orbits.

We think of the solar system as the area of space that falls within the gravitational influence of the Sunday.

The celestial body was initially identified in mid October by a team of experts led by Scott Sheppard, astronomer in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, D.C.

The answer could be found by studying enough objects in this outer region. It was found a few weeks ago as part of an ongoing deep-sky search for distant objects in the solar system. “There’s several different theories about how these distant objects could have got out there on these eccentric orbits”.