We have a new neighbor in the solar system. An international team of astronomers has discovered, thanks to the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Maunakea (Hawaii) within the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) , a new dwarf planet located beyond the orbit of Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt. It has one of the largest orbits for a dwarf planet, since its furthest point is 19,000 million kilometers from the Sun.
The brand new frozen world has a diameter of about 700 kilometers and has been provisionally christened “2015 RR45” by the Center for Minor Planets of the International Astronomical Union. Its distance is such that it takes 18.5 hours for sunlight to reach the dwarf planet.
Astronomer JJ Kavelaars found this object in February 2016 thanks to the OSSOS project that uses powerful computers to hunt images. It was then that Kavelaars detected a bright moving object that was 120 times farther from the Sun than it was from Earth.
The data about its size and luminosity – a great success to have found an icy world much brighter than usual – will help to continue completing the pieces of the historical puzzle of our Solar System.
We are without a doubt one of the meager dwarf planets that has survived to this day, along with Pluto, Ceres or Eris, since most of the dwarf planets like the one just discovered, were destroyed or expelled from the solar system as the planets giants were located in what are currently their positions. In the coming years, once officially baptized by the International Astronomical Union, we will learn more details about its great and peculiar orbit, among other things.
