| Title | Binary Asteroid May Have Been Torn Apart by "Planet Nine" | |
| Date | Friday February 24 2017, @01:39AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the maybe-torn-apart-by-six-of-nine dept. | ||
A team of astronomers investigating extreme trans-Neptunian objects (orbiting at more than 150 AU) has found two objects that may have been torn apart by a gravitational encounter with a planet:
a team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid has taken a step towards the physical characterization of these bodies, and to confirm or refute the hypothesis of Planet Nine by studying them. The scientists have made the first spectroscopic observations of 2004 VN112 and 2013 RF98, both of them particularly interesting dynamically because their orbits are almost identical and the poles of the orbits are separated by a very small angle.
This [suggests] a common origin, and their present-day orbits could be the result of a past interaction with the hypothetical Planet Nine. This study, recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that this pair of ETNOs was a binary asteroid which separated after an encounter with a planet beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Also at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.
Visible spectra of (474640) 2004 VN112–2013 RF98 with OSIRIS at the 10.4 m GTC: evidence for binary dissociation near aphelion among the extreme trans-Neptunian objects (open, DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx003) (DX)
The existence of significant anisotropies in the distributions of the directions of perihelia and orbital poles of the known extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) has been used to claim that trans-Plutonian planets may exist. Among the known ETNOs, the pair (474640) 2004 VN112–2013 RF98 stands out. Their orbital poles and the directions of their perihelia and their velocities at perihelion/aphelion are separated by a few degrees, but orbital similarity does not necessarily imply common physical origin. In an attempt to unravel their physical nature, visible spectroscopy of both targets was obtained using the OSIRIS camera-spectrograph at the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). From the spectral analysis, we find that 474640–2013 RF98 have similar spectral slopes (12 versus 15 per cent/0.1 μm), very different from Sedna's but compatible with those of (148209) 2000 CR105 and 2012 VP113. These five ETNOs belong to the group of seven linked to the Planet Nine hypothesis. A dynamical pathway consistent with these findings is dissociation of a binary asteroid during a close encounter with a planet and we confirm its plausibility using N-body simulations. We thus conclude that both the dynamical and spectroscopic properties of 474640–2013 RF98 favour a genetic link and their current orbits suggest that the pair was kicked by a perturber near aphelion.
Recently: NASA Website Allows Public to Search WISE Data for Nearby Objects and Planet Nine
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