New Inner Oort Cloud Object Discovered

 

Oort Cloud Studies Are Just Beginning

This week, astronomers at Washington D.C.’s Carnegie Institution for Science announced the discovery of what is so far the most distant object in the solar system. The dwarf planet, currently named V774104 orbits the sun at a distance which is three times farther out than Pluto.

The exact orbit of the object has yet to be definitively identified, but it is thought that it may fall into one of two camps: inner Oort cloud objects whose orbits are influenced by the gravitational pull of Neptune or more mysterious dwarf objects like Sedna or 2012 VP113, whose orbits never take them inside that of Neptune.

The original article is well worth a read and a share …

Oort Cloud Object
Three times farther than Pluto, V774104 may join a club of solar system objects whose orbits cannot yet be explained. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers spot most distant object in the solar system, could point to other rogue planets

By Eric Hand
10 November 2015 2:15 pm

NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND—Astronomers have found the most distant object ever in our solar system, three times farther away than Pluto. The dwarf planet, which has been designated V774104, is between 500 and 1000 kilometers across. It will take another year before scientists pin down its orbit, but it could end up joining an emerging class of extreme solar system objects whose strange orbits point to the hypothetical influence of rogue planets or nearby stars.

…… The dwarf planet could eventually join one of two clubs. If its orbit one day takes it closer to our sun, it would become part of a more common population of icy worlds whose orbits can be explained by gravitational interactions with Neptune. But if its orbit never brings it close to the sun, it could join a rare club with two other worlds, Sedna and 2012 VP113.

These two dwarf planets never come within 50 AU of the sun, and their orbits swing as far out as 1000 AU. Sheppard calls them “inner Oort cloud objects” to distinguish them from icy Kuiper Belt objects, which reside between 30 and 50 AU. The Oort cloud is a hypothetical, thinly populated sphere of icy bodies, thousands of AU away, that marks the edge of the solar system and the end of the sun’s gravitational influence.

What makes the inner Oort cloud objects interesting is that their eccentric orbits cannot be explained by the known structure of the solar system: Something else had to perturb their orbits. Possible explanations include an unseen giant planet that still orbits in the deep or one that was ejected from the solar system, disturbing inner Oort cloud objects on its way out. Other theories suggest that gravitational forces, acting on the solar system when the protosun was surrounded by other stellar nurseries, could have provided the necessary nudges.

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For the full article, please see ScienceMag.org

 


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