High Perihelion Trans-Neptunian Object Added to Cluster of "Planet Nine" Influenced Orbits

Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine 27 comments

2015 BP₅₁₉, nicknamed "Caju", is another extreme trans-Neptunian object that points to the existence of Planet Nine. Discovered with data from the Dark Energy Survey, Caju has a relatively large diameter, estimated at around 400-700 km, meaning the object could be a gravitationally rounded dwarf planet. It also has a highly inclined orbit of 54°, which a team of scientists says can be explained by the presence of the hypothetical Planet Nine:

After discovering it, the team tried to investigate 2015 BP₅₁₉'s origins using computer simulations of the Solar System. However, these tests were not able to adequately explain how the object had ended with such an orbit.
But when the team added a ninth planet with properties exactly matching those predicted by the Caltech scientists in 2016, the orbit of 2015 BP₅₁₉ suddenly made sense. "The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do," Juliette Becker, a Michigan graduate student and lead author of the study told Quanta.
Some researchers, however, caution that Planet Nine may not be the only explanation for 2015 BP₅₁₉'s strange orbit. Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer from Queen's University Belfast, in Ireland, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek that while the latest findings were "a great discovery," other scenarios could account for its tilt. "This object is unusual because it's on a high inclination," she said. "This can be used to maybe tell us some things about its formation process. There are a number of models that suggest you can probably put objects like this into the shape of orbit and the tilt of orbit that we see today."

Also at Quanta Magazine.

Discovery and Dynamical Analysis of an Extreme Trans-Neptunian Object with a High Orbital Inclination (arXiv:1805.05355)

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CU Boulder Researchers Say Collective Gravity, Not Planet Nine, Explains Orbits of Detached Objects 16 comments

takyon writes:

Collective gravity, not Planet Nine, may explain the orbits of 'detached objects'

Bumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system—and not a mysterious ninth planet—may explain the the dynamics of strange bodies called "detached objects," according to a new study. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna—an icy minor planet that circles the sun at a distance of nearly 8 billion miles. Scientists have struggled to explain why Sedna and a handful of other bodies at that distance look separated from the rest of the solar system. [...] The researchers presented their findings today at a press briefing at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which runs from June 3-7 in Denver, Colorado.
[...] [Jacob] Fleisig had calculated that the orbits of icy objects beyond Neptune circle the sun like the hands of a clock. Some of those orbits, such as those belonging to asteroids, move like the minute hand, or relatively fast and in tandem. Others, the orbits of bigger objects like Sedna, move more slowly. They're the hour hand. Eventually, those hands meet. "You see a pileup of the orbits of smaller objects to one side of the sun," said Fleisig, who is the lead author of the new research. "These orbits crash into the bigger body, and what happens is those interactions will change its orbit from an oval shape to a more circular shape." In other words, Sedna's orbit goes from normal to detached, entirely because of those small-scale interactions.

Also at Popular Mechanics, where Planet Nine proposer Konstantin Batygin disputes the findings:

Batygin, of Caltech, tells Popular Mechanics that any sufficiently strong gravitational encounter could detach an object from Neptune's embrace, but for the distant small bodies of the Kuiper belt to have done so through "self-gravity"—as the CU model proposes—there would need to be about five to ten times the mass of Earth in the outer parts of the Kuiper belt. There isn't.
"Unfortunately, the self-gravity story suffers from the following complications," Batygin says. "Both observational and theoretical estimates place the total mass of the Kuiper belt at a value significantly smaller than that of the Earth [only 1 to 10 percent Earth's mass]. As a consequence, Kuiper belt objects generally behave like test-particles enslaved by Neptune's gravitational pull, rather than a self-interacting group of planetoids."

Planet Nine.

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Planet Nine Search Turns Up 10 More Moons of Jupiter 3 comments

takyon writes:

Astronomers have found a new crop of moons around Jupiter, and one of them is a weirdo

Ten more moons have been confirmed to orbit around Jupiter, bringing the planet's total known satellite count to 79. That's the highest number of moons of any planet in the Solar System. And these newly discovered space rocks are giving astronomers insight as to why the Jupiter system looks like it does today.
Astronomers at Carnegie Institution for Science first found these moons in March 2017, along with two others that were already confirmed in June of last year. The team initially found all 12 moons using the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile, though finding these objects wasn't their main goal. Instead, they were searching for incredibly distant small objects — or even planets — that might be lurking in our Solar System beyond Pluto. But as they searched for these fringe space rocks, they decided to take a peek at what might be lurking around Jupiter at the same time. Now, the moons they found have been observed multiple times, and their exact orbits have been submitted for approval from the International Astronomical Union, which officially recognizes celestial bodies.
These moons are all pretty tiny, ranging between less than a mile and nearly two miles wide. And they break down into three different types. Two orbit closer to Jupiter, moving in the same direction that the planet spins. Farther out from those, about 15.5 million miles from the planet, there are nine that rotate in the opposite direction, moving against Jupiter's rotation. But in this same distant region, one strange moon that astronomers are calling Valetudo is moving with Jupiter's spin, like the two inner moons.

Moons of Jupiter.

Also at NPR and CNN.

Previously: Two Tiny New Moons Found Around Jupiter

Original Submission

"Farout": Most Distant Known Solar System Object Spotted, at 120 AU 17 comments

takyon writes:

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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