The farthest known object in the solar system is now confirmed. FarFarOut, a large piece of rock found in 2018 at a huge distance of about 132 astronomical units from the Sun, has been studied and characterized, and now we know much more about it and its orbit.
It is about 400 kilometers in diameter, located at the lower end of the scale of the dwarf planet, and early observations suggest that it has an average orbital distance of 101 astronomical units, or 101 times the distance between Earth. and the Sun.
Since Pluto has an average orbital distance of about 39 astronomical units, FarFarOut is very, very, very far away. He has been assigned the provisional designation 2018 AG37, and its proper name, according to the guidelines of the International Astronomical Union, is still pending.
This orbit, however, is not an even circle around the Sun, but a really uneven oval. After careful observation, scientists have calculated its orbit; FarFarOut oscillates up to 175 astronomical units and reaches up to 27 astronomical units, within the orbit of Neptune.
(Roberto Molar Candanosa, Scott S. Sheppard / CIS and Brooks Bays / UH)
This means that the object could help us better understand the planets in the outer solar system.
“FarFarOut probably launched into the outer solar system by getting too close to Neptune in the distant past,” said astronomer Chad Trujillo of the University of Northern Arizona. “FarFarOut will likely interact with Neptune again in the future, as its orbits still intersect.”
The nickname of the object evolved from the discovery of a distant object earlier in 2018.
Artist’s impression of FarFarOut. (NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva)
The dwarf planet Farout has an average orbital distance of 124 astronomical units and was named after an exclamation made by astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science. When he and his team discovered an even more distant object, the progression was evident.
FarFarOut is still very mysterious. Because it is so far away, it is extremely weak and has only been observed nine times over two years. The team has inferred its size based on its brightness, but we don’t know much more; it could be a very large irregular object in the Kuiper Belt, or it could meet the criteria to be classified as a dwarf planet.
FarFarOut Discovery Images Retrieved July 2018. (Scott S. Sheppard / Carnegie Institution for Science)
Astronomers are also not entirely sure of their orbiting time. They think it might just be shy 800 years old (Pluto’s is 248), but there’s enough room to take more than twice that time or possibly move at a much faster pace.
Therefore, many more observations will need to be made to better understand it.
“It takes FarFarOut a millennium to orbit the Sun once,” said astronomer David Tholen of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. “Because of this, it moves very slowly across the sky, which requires several years of observations to accurately determine its trajectory.”
Sheppard, Tholen and Trujillo are working on the study of the outer Solar System in hopes of acquiring a vision of the New Planet, a hypothetical object believed to be responsible for the strange movement of clusters of objects in the outside Beyond Pluto.
There are other explanations for these orbits, but the work has an excellent secondary benefit. The team has discovered a number of objects that we did not know. There is Farout and FarFarOut, of course. There is also a dwarf planet called The Goblin, discovered at a distance of 80 astronomical units.
There is even an object, called 2014 FE72, whose orbit makes it out of more than 3,000 astronomical units, the only known object of its kind with an orbit completely outside Neptune. (It is currently much closer after its approach to the Sun in 1965.)
Nor is it just the outer solar system. Researchers have discovered 12 moons orbiting Jupiter and 20 moons around Saturn.
So if there’s a New Planet out there, it looks like it’s the people who will find it. But in the process, they reveal a lot of things about the outer solar system.
“The discovery of FarFarOut shows our growing ability to map the outer solar system and observe more and more toward the margins of our solar system,” Sheppard said.
“Only with the advances of recent years in large digital cameras in very large telescopes has it been possible to discover very distant objects as efficiently as FarFarOut. Although some of these distant objects are quite large (the size of dwarf planets) , are very weak due to their extreme distances from the Sun. FarFarOut is just the tip of the iceberg of objects from the very distant solar system. “