Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a miniature planet
that is the most distant body ever found in the solar system, scientists
said on Wednesday.
"We can't really classify the object yet, as
we don't know its orbit," said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. "We only just found
this object a few weeks ago."
Based on its reflectivity,
scientists believe the icy body, known as V774101, is between 300 and
600 miles (500 to 1,000 km) in diameter, roughly half the size of Pluto.
It is almost 10 billion miles from Earth, or three times farther away
than Pluto.
Currently, the most distant planet-like bodies in the
solar system are Sedna, discovered in 2003, and VP113, discovered in
2012. At more than 80 times farther from the sun than Earth, the two are
still closer than V774101, which is currently 103 times more distant
from the sun than Earth.
Sheppard said it will take a year of
observations to determine if V774101 travels into Pluto's neighbourhood,
a region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. This swath of space,
which contains thousands of tiny planets, is 40 to 50 times farther away
from the sun than Earth.
"If it never gets near Neptune that
would make the object very interesting as its orbit would be unperturbed
by the giant planets and thus allow us to understand the dynamics of
the outer solar system," Sheppard wrote in an email.
Sheppard is part of team that is conducting the most extensive search for distant bodies in the solar system.
"It
is very much like looking for a needle in a haystack as the night sky
covers a very large area that can only be searched one telescope
pointing at a time," Sheppard said.
The discovery was unveiled at an American Astronomical Society planetary sciences meeting in Maryland this week.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
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