The solar system has a new distance champ. - NBCNewsMACH
. Farout, officially known as 2018 VG18, currently lies about 120 AU from the sun. The object is thought to be a dwarf planet that takes about 1,000 years to complete one lap around our star.
To clarify: The distance records we're talking about here are for objects' current locations. There are many bodies that get well beyond 140 AU at some point on their paths around the sun. The dwarf planet Sedna, for example, gets more than 900 AU away. And the gigantic Oort cloud, which begins at about 5,000 AU from the sun, likely contains trillions of comets.
Sheppard has been scouring the outer solar system for years, along with chief collaborators Chad Trujillo of the ,Northern Arizona University and Dave Tholen of the University of Hawaii, using instruments including the 8-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The researchers are not only surveying a little-known realm but also hunting for signs of the hypothesized Planet Nine .
The team's work — and that of other researchers, notably Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech — suggests thatmay indeed exist in the dark depths of the far outer solar system. The orbits of many small, far-flung objects appear to have been sculpted by the gravity of a big"perturber," which may be about 10 times more massive than Earth and lie, on average, about 600 AU from the sun.
The Planet Nine search is no fool's errand: Sheppard puts the probability of the world's existence at 85 percent, he
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