Astronomers discover solar system's most distant object, nicknamed 'FarFarOut'
For most people, snow days aren't very productive. Some people, though, use the time to discover the most distant object in the solar system.
That's what Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., did this week when a snow squall shut down the city. A glitzy public talk he was due to deliver was delayed, so he hunkered down and did what he does best: sifted through telescopic views of the solar system's fringes that his team had taken last month during their search for a hypothesized ninth giant planet.
That's when he saw it, a faint object at a distance 140 times farther from the sun than Earth—the farthest solar system object yet known, some 3.5 times more distant than Pluto. The object, if confirmed, would break his team's own discovery, announced in December 2018, of a dwarf planet 120 times farther out than Earth, which they nicknamed "Farout." For now, they are jokingly calling the new object "FarFarOut." "This is hot off the presses," he said during his rescheduled talk on 21 February.
"Farout" is designated 2018 VG18 by the Minor Planet Center. "FarFarOut" has no designation yet.
List of Solar System objects most distant from the Sun in 2018.
Previously: "Farout": Most Distant Known Solar System Object Spotted, at 120 AU
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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.
Astronomers Confirm Solar System's Most Distant Known Object Is Indeed Farfarout
Astronomers Confirm Solar System's Most Distant Known Object Is Indeed Farfarout:
With the help of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, and other ground-based telescopes, astronomers have confirmed that a faint object discovered in 2018 and nicknamed "Farfarout" is indeed the most distant object yet found in our Solar System. The object has just received its designation from the International Astronomical Union.
Farfarout was first spotted in January 2018 by the Subaru Telescope, located on Maunakea in Hawai'i. Its discoverers could tell it was very far away, but they weren't sure exactly how far. They needed more observations.
"At that time we did not know the object's orbit as we only had the Subaru discovery observations over 24 hours, but it takes years of observations to get an object's orbit around the Sun," explained co-discoverer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science. "All we knew was that the object appeared to be very distant at the time of discovery."
Sheppard and his colleagues, David Tholen of the University of Hawai'i and Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University, spent the next few years tracking the object with the Gemini North telescope (also on Maunakea in Hawai'i) and the Carnegie Institution for Science's Magellan Telescopes in Chile to determine its orbit. [1] They have now confirmed that Farfarout currently lies 132 astronomical units (au) from the Sun, which is 132 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. (For comparison, Pluto is 39 au from the Sun, on average.)
Farfarout is even more remote than the previous Solar System distance record-holder, which was discovered by the same team and nicknamed "Farout." Provisionally designated 2018 VG18, Farout is 124 au from the Sun.
However, the orbit of Farfarout is quite elongated, taking it 175 au from the Sun at its farthest point and around 27 au at its closest, which is inside the orbit of Neptune. Because its orbit crosses Neptune's, Farfarout could provide insights into the history of the outer Solar System.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:04AM (3 children)
What is the largest distance an object could have to the sun while still being part of our solar system?
Well, a first guess would be about 2 light years, as that is half the distance to the next star, but I don't expect that it is that simple.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 23 2019, @12:21PM
The Heliopause is quite-reasonably regarded as the _real_ surface of the Sun:
It's where the Solar Wind is swept away by the Interstellar Wind.
However.
The real _limit_ to the Solar System would be reasonably the point at which a comet would be more-likely to fall into the gravity well of some _other_ star than our own.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:18PM (1 child)
About one-half to one light year for a stable orbit, although there's no hard limit. Over the millions of years that anything that distant would take to complete an orbit, the entire Solar System moves relative to other stars. So the limitation isn't really the distance to the nearest star, but how stable the orbits are in this region relative to the amount of gravitational "noise" produced by the passing of nearby stars.
The theoretical maximum limit is where the Sun's gravitational sphere of influence ends and the galaxy's begins (much as there's a maximum distance at which an object can orbit the Earth before it just ends up orbiting the Sun instead). This is called the Hill sphere [wikipedia.org]. In practice, because it is easy to perturb an object out of orbit in the outer regions of this zone, the maximum stable orbit is normally about half the radius of the Hill sphere.
The Sun has a Hill sphere of about 3.6 light years, and would normally have stable orbits out to about 1.8 light years, but the maximum stable orbit is probably less than that as a result of the influence of passing stars. Nevertheless, the Oort Cloud is considered likely to extend almost all the way to the edge of the Hill sphere. Although this is potentially closer to Alpha Centauri than it is to the Sun, Alpha Centauri is only in one direction and the Oort Cloud could extend farther out in other directions. Objects floating around that far out would only be temporarily bound to the Sun and would be exchanged "frequently" (on cosmological timescales) with other stars and with the Milky Way itself.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:30PM
Correct about the Hill sphere. I want to add that without the influence of other objects, there is no limit on orbital distance. If the entire universe had just 2 bodies, they could orbit each other no matter how far apart they were. They could be a million light years apart, and be in a very, very, very slow orbit about each other.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 23 2019, @12:20PM (3 children)
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @01:18PM (2 children)
They named it the same as what I call my wife.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:32PM (1 child)
Perhaps they were inspired by an old children's show, Far Out Space Nuts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @03:17AM
Catchy theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TueALMuOi5Q [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @03:33PM (3 children)
People in the future will cringe at this era of dumb names
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:29PM (1 child)
Cringey McCringeFace
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:22PM
I'd like to see it called TommyChong-THC1
Or, Cheechy-Chong as my mother called them. ;)
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:28PM
> People in the future will cringe at this era of dumb names
The close future people, those who text borked English and emoji all day ?
Sure...