Astronomers have discovered an extremely distant dwarf planet, called The Goblin (Goblin), a finding that completely redefines the boundaries of our solar system.
Astronomers made the discovery while searching for a hypothetical massive planet, known as Planet Nine, which is suspected to be orbiting well beyond Pluto in a mysterious region known as the Oort Cloud. Planet Nine has yet to be directly observed, but The Goblin appears to be under the gravitational influence of a giant invisible object, increasing astronomers’ certainty that the great planet is out there.
The newly discovered little icy world, estimated to be only 300 km in diameter , is in an extremely elongated orbit. At its closest, it is about two and a half times as far from the Sun as Pluto. Then it goes to the outermost fringes of the solar system, almost 60 times farther than Pluto, which takes about 40,000 years to circle our star.
This object is the third minor planet to be found in the outer solar system, following the discoveries of Sedna and recently another object named 2012 VP113. And this region, which once seemed cold, dark and empty, now seems to have a rich collection of exotic and extreme objects. A planetary garden.
“We are only now discovering what the outer solar system would look like and what might be out there,” said Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC and a co-author of the paper. “ We believe that there are thousands of dwarf planets in the distant solar system. Right now we are seeing the tip of the iceberg, ” he continues.
Interestingly, the orbits of the three objects discovered so far appear to be clustered, suggesting that they are being guided by an unknown giant object. Something big and distant. This has pointed out to astronomers the existence of a super-Earth, planet Nine.
Konstantin Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary sciences at Caltech who has worked on theoretical simulations of the hypothetical Planet Nine , described the latest observations as a “great discovery.” “Despite centuries of surveys, our understanding of the solar system remains incomplete. This certainly adds to the growing record of objects showing the influence of Planet Nine,” says Batygin.
The formal name of the new dwarf planet, assigned by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union, is 2015 TG387. But it soon acquired a more memorable nickname (the Goblin) because “the human examination of the candidate objects occurred around Halloween time,” explained David Tholen of the University of Hawaii and a member of the observation team.
The discovery was made using the Japanese 8-meter Subaru telescope located on the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. The telescope is the only one in the world that can produce deep images capable of probing the confines of the solar system, while having a field of view wide enough to be able to capture an adequate portion of the sky to discover rare objects. “With other large telescopes, it’s like looking through a straw and they are good at looking at things that you know are there, but not at finding new things as their field of view is too small to cover large areas of the sky,” he said. Sheppard.
The team will begin a new series of observations in November, in hopes of finding more objects, possibly including the elusive Planet Nine.
Reference: “A New High Perihelion Inner Oort Cloud Object,” Scott S. Sheppard et al., 2018 Oct. 2, IAU Minor Planet Center. Astronomical journal
Image credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa and Scott Sheppard, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science.
