Astronomers Confirm Existence Of ‘Planetoid’, The Most Distant Object Ever Observed
- 3 years ago
It has recently come to light that a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have detected the existence of a planetoid that is almost four times farther from the sun than pluto. The planetoid is nicknamed ‘Farfarout’ and was first spotted back in 2018.
As reported by the University of Hawaii, Farfarout’s current distance from the Sun is 132 astronomical units (au) and the newly discovered object has a very elongated orbit that takes it out to 175 au at its most distant, and inside the orbit of Neptune, to around 27 au, when it is closest to the Sun. “A single orbit of Farfarout around the Sun takes a millennium,” said Tholen. “Because of this long orbital period, it moves very slowly across the sky, requiring several years of observations to precisely determine its trajectory.”
The report also states that “farfarout” is very faint based on its brightness and distance from the Sun. The team estimates the object’s size to be about 400 km across. “The discovery of Farfarout shows our increasing ability to map the outer solar system and observe farther and farther towards the fringes of our solar system,” said Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
He further added that “only with the advancements in the last few years of large digital cameras on very large telescopes has it been possible to efficiently discover very distant objects like Farfarout. Even though some of these distant objects are quite large, being a dwarf planet in size, they are very faint because of their extreme distances from the Sun. Farfarout is just the tip of the iceberg of solar system objects in the very distant solar system.”
Source: Mashable
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