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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the yep,-the-name-checks-out dept.

2018 VG18 is the first solar system object to be spotted at over 100 astronomical units from the Sun. Nicknamed "Farout", the object has a diameter of around 500 km and a pinkish color:

Farout is 120 astronomical units (AU) from the sun — one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). The object is more than 3.5 times the current distance between Pluto and the sun (34 AU), and it outpaces the previous farthest-known solar system object, the dwarf planet Eris, which is currently about 96 AU from the sun. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft recently entered interstellar space at about 120 AU, leaving the sun's "sphere of influence" called the heliopause, where bodies experience the solar wind.

To be clear: The record Farout now holds is for the most-distant solar system body ever observed. That doesn't mean no other objects gets farther away from the sun than 120 AU. In fact, we know some that do. The dwarf planet Sedna gets more than 900 AU away on its highly elliptical orbit, for example, and there are probably trillions of comets in the Oort Cloud, which lies between about 5,000 AU and 100,000 AU from the sun.

Scott S. Sheppard, David Tholen, and Chad Trujillo, the team that discovered "Farout", also announced the discovery of 2015 TG387, "The Goblin", earlier this year. They hope to find more extreme trans-Neptunian objects in order to determine the location or existence of Planet Nine.


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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:04AM (1 child)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:04AM (#775708)

    "nuke the entire site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:07AM (#775710)

    Ripley