The solar system officially has a new, extraordinarily dwarf member: “suggests it may be more populated than we thought”

Researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey announced that they have detected a candidate dwarf planet with an extreme orbit around the Sun. The object, named 2017 OF201, is located beyond Neptune and it is estimated that it orbits the Sun roughly every 25,000 years.

The findings have been confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center but still have to be peer reviewed. However, the discovery of this object could reshape what we know about our solar system and challenge a hypothesis that a Planet X is lurking in the dark vastness beyond Neptune.

“2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable”

A team of scientists discovered 2017 OF201 as part of an ongoing research project to identify trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) as well as possible new planets in the outer solar system. The researchers sifted through seven years of openly available archival data from the Blanco telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope based in Hawaii.

They pinpointed and tracked the potential dwarf planet’s motion across 19 sets of images and then plotted its trajectory with a computational algorithm they developed. At its closest on its orbit to the Sun, 2017 OF201 is 44.5 times farther from the Sun than Earth, or 44.5 AU, roughly the distance of Pluto’s orbit. Meanwhile at its furthest, the object reaches a whopping distance of over 1,600 AU.

“2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable,” said Sihao Cheng, lead author of the study, in a statement.

“It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,” said Eritas Yang, one of the study’s co-authors.

“There may have been more than one step in its migration,” added Cheng. “It’s possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back.”

“There could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size”

2017 OF201 is a roughly spherical object and is estimated to be about 435 miles (700 kilometers) in diameter, making it the second largest body of its kind in the solar system with such a wide orbit.

“Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this,” said co-author Jiaxuan Li. This outlier could challenge the potential existence of a Planet X or Planet 9, theorized to be orbiting billions of miles beyond Neptune gravitationally shepherding some TNOs.

“The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now,” said Cheng.

“Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system,” he added.

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