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posted by martyb on Sunday August 14 2016, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-did-it-get-THERE? dept.

"Niku", also known as 2011 KT19, is a newly discovered trans-Neptunian object with an unusual orbit around the Sun:

There are plenty of weird objects in our solar system, but the newly discovered trans-Neptunian object (TNO) Niku might be one of the weirdest. It's not the composition of Niku that makes it strange. It seems to be a chunk of ice about 124 miles (200 km) in diameter, placing it at the lower threshhold of objects that might be considered dwarf planets. There are plenty of objects its size and its composition out in the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

No, the really weird thing about Niku is that it's far, far, far above the ecliptic — the sort of "plane" of the solar system on which the planets lie, with the Earth considered at the 0 degree point on the ecliptic. So how far is Niku above it? 110 degrees. In other words, it's so far above it that it has entered a retrograde orbit. The most inclined of the planets is Mercury, at 7 degrees above the ecliptic. Dwarf planets Pluto and Eris are 17 degrees and 44 degrees above it, with many dwarf planets falling in that range. Many smaller solar system objects can be in inclined orbits, including asteroids and comets. But Niku is certainly one of the largest objects in such an orbit.

Also at New Scientist.

Discovery of A New Retrograde Trans-Neptunian Object: Hint of A Common Orbital Plane for Low Semi-Major Axis, High Inclination TNOs and Centaurs


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @10:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @10:51PM (#388003)

    We used the covariance matrix generated by the orbit fitting code of Bernstein & Khushalani (2000) and generated 1,000 clones drawn from within 3-sigma of the best-fit orbit.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01808 [arxiv.org]

    Why do they do this? Instead they should sample from the entire distribution of possible orbits.

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