HARROW: Consider the newly found V774101, a pint-sized planetoid about 103 times farther away from the sun than Earth – roughly three times farther than Pluto – a new distance record for a solar system object.
“We can’t really classify the object yet, as we don’t know its orbit”, said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “We only just found this object a few weeks ago”.
The object’s extreme perch – beyond the edge of the Kuiper belt (home to Eris and Pluto) and into the inner fringes of the next part of the Solar System, known as the Oort cloud – suggests that it could be of scientific significance.
The discovery was unveiled at an American Astronomical Society planetary sciences meeting in Maryland this week.
“What makes the inner Oort cloud objects interesting is that their eccentric orbits can not be explained by the known structure of the solar system: something else had to perturb their orbits”, he writes. Objects in this primordial realm follow orbits that have remained undisturbed for several billion years.
Sedna and VP113 are the only known objects in the Solar System with orbits that can not be explained by current models.
We think of the solar system as the area of space that falls within the gravitational influence of the Sunday.
“We don’t know anything about its orbit”, New Scientist quoted Sheppard as saying.
“It could end up joining an emerging class of extreme solar system objects whose odd orbits point to the hypothetical influence of rogue planets or nearby stars”, said a report in the journal Science.
