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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [subarutelescope.org], located on Maunakea in Hawai‘i. Its discoverers could tell [carnegiescience.edu] 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 [noirlab.edu] telescope (also on Maunakea in Hawai‘i) and the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Magellan Telescopes [carnegiescience.edu] 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.

Wikipedia sumarizes [wikipedia.org]:

2018 AG37 (previously nicknamed FarFarOut) is a distant trans-Neptunian object that was discovered 132.2 ± 4.6 AU (19.78 ± 0.69 billion km) AU from the Sun,[5] further than any currently observable known object in the Solar System.[3][6] Imaged in January 2018 during a search for the hypothetical Planet Nine,[7] the confirmation of this object was announced in a press release in February 2021 by astronomers Scott Sheppard, David Tholen, and Chad Trujillo. The object was nicknamed "FarFarOut" to emphasize its distance from the Sun.[8]

At a very faint apparent magnitude of +25, only the largest telescopes in the world can observe it.[1] Being so far from the Sun, 2018 AG37 moves very slowly among the background stars and has only been observed 9 times over 2 years.[4] It may require an observation arc of several years to refine the uncertainties in the ~1000 year orbital period.

Let's look at it another way. Something traveling at the speed of light could — in just one second — make over 7 laps around the Earth's surface at the equator. Now keep in mind there are 60 seconds in one minute and 60 minutes in one hour; that makes 3,600 seconds in one hour. Farfarout is so distant that light from the Sun takes anywhere from 3.7 to 24.2 hours to reach Farfarout.

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