What astronomers believed was the farthest object in the solar system, “Farout,” has lost its title after just two years. This crown now goes to “Farfarout” (zero points for creativity, you guys), a planetoid that is more than 130 times farther from the Sun than Earth.
As you saw Reverse, after years of observations, have been confirmed by astronomers that the planetoid designated by the Minor Planet Center as AG37 2018, nicknamed Farfarout, is the farthest object in the solar system known to 132 astronomical units from the Sun.
A single AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun, also known as 148 million kilometers. (For reference, the previous Farout headline, officially designated 2018 VG18, is “only”) At 120 AU away.) This means that Farfarout is about 12.3 billion miles or 19.7 billion miles away, or by context, about four times farther from the Sun than Pluto. At this distance, the planetoid completes a single orbit around the Sun only once in a millennium.
“Because of this long orbital period, it moves very slowly across the sky, which requires several years of observations to accurately determine its trajectory,” said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University’s Institute of Astronomy. of Hawaii and team member behind the discovery. , he said to a statement this week.
He the team — Thholen, Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Chad Trujillo of the University of Northern Arizona — originally detected the asteroid in 2018 with the 8-meter Subaru telescope located at the top of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. In later years, they have used the Gemini North telescope, also located at Mauna Kea, and the Magellan telescope in Chile to determine Farfarout’s orbit and confirm its status as the farthest known object in our solar system.
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“Farfarout’s discovery shows our growing ability to map the outer solar system and observe more and more toward the margins of our solar system,” Sheppard said in this week’s statement. “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”
There is still much that scientists do not know about this incredibly distant planetoid, but they have discovered some clues in their research. The team believes it is at the “lower end” of the dwarf planet’s scale “assuming it is an ice-rich object” and has an estimated diameter of about 400 km. It has an incredibly long orbit that intersects with Neptune, which led scientists to speculate that Farfarout may have been a much closer planetary neighbor, but that it had possibly moved too far away from Neptune and was abandoned at the ends. of our solar system as a result of the much greater gravity of the celestial body.
Astronomers believe that studying Farfarout may provide an idea of how Neptune formed and evolved in our solar system, and the two are likely to interact once again because of their intersecting orbits.
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. Sheppard called the planetoid “just the tip of the iceberg of objects in the solar system in the very distant solar system.” Who knows, maybe at this time next year we will have a FarfarFARin our hands.