Our solar system officially has eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But just about everyone has heard of Pluto. Until 2006, therefore, always talked about nine planets. But after that it was decided that Pluto’s classification as a planet was too doubtful. And so it became a dwarf planet.
At the moment there are only five official dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake. But there are still a lot of objects in our solar system that are a candidate for the status of Dwergplanet.
And now astronomers may add one more to that list. They may have discovered a new dwarf planet in our solar system. He was given the provisional name 2017 or201 and is located in the outer corners of the solar system.
© via Reuters
“We have discovered a very large trans-neptunic object in a very exotic job,” said Sihao Cheng, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “It doesn’t differ much from how Pluto was discovered. This project was really an adventure.”
The researchers found the candidate dwarf planet by accurately digging a huge dataset from a telescope in Chile that raced the universe in search of evidence for dark energy. By combining observations over time, the researchers identified a moving object with migrations that followed a clear pattern.
“We used public data that have been there for a long time,” said Jiaxuan Li, co -author of the research and doctoral student at Princeton University. “It was just hidden there.”
Very far away
2017 of201 would take more than 24,000 years to turn around the sun once and would be at the nearest point at 4.2 billion miles (6.8 billion kilometers) from the sun. The furthest point of the sun is 151 billion miles (243 billion kilometers). For comparison: Neptunus is 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from our sun.
2017 of201 would be about 692 kilometers wide and would therefore be large enough to ensure that his gravity pulls it in a convex shape. What is one of the criteria to be a dwarf planet. But 2017 of201, just like Pluto, would not be large enough to “have made his environment” from other objects near his job.
The findings of Sihao Cheng and his colleagues have not yet been published and were therefore not yet read by other astronomers.
