The list of dwarf planets in the fact that she got to Pluto has since this Monday a new member

This is the photograph taken closest to the Sun

The list of dwarf planets in the fact that she got to Pluto in 2006, has since this Monday a new member. A team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a world, unknown until now, in the confines of the Solar System. It has been officially christened as 2018 VG18 and dubbed with the name Farout, which in English means distant, remote, or extreme.

As confirmed by the Center of Minor Planets of the International Astronomical Union, it is also the celestial body most distant discovered in the Solar System. 2018 VG18 overtaken, as well, the little Eris, considered until now as the further away from the Earth.

As explained in a communiqué, the Institution for Science, Carnegie of Washington, where he investigates Scott S. Sheppard, one of its discoverers, Farout is the first celestial body in the Solar System that is detected to a distance one hundred times greater than that separating the Earth from the Sun. This separation between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 150 million kilometers, is called the Astronomical Unit (AU) and serves to measure the large distances in the cosmos.

Farout is 120 AU, while Eris is at 96 UA. Pluto, for her part, is 34 UA, so that the new dwarf planet would be three times farther away than him. To detect a body so far has been made possible by combining several telescopes. The first images were obtained on the 10th of November with the japanese telescope Subaru, of eight meters, located at the Mauna Kena, Hawaii. Subsequently, it began a campaign of observation which lasted for several nights to confirm the existence of this dwarf planet that was captured for the second time in early December from the telescope Magellan, in the observatory, chile of The Bells. It was also in Chile where they were able to estimate that the planet is located at a distance of 120 Astronomical Units.

500 km in diameter

The announcement has not been made to wait and has arrived in full boom of discoveries of planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets. Despite the fact that this field is one of the most flourishing in astronomy, there are many scientists trying to figure out if there is really the so-called Planet X, or Planet 9, of which to date have only been obtained some indirect clues. The possible existence of this distant world, which, if confirmed, would be the ninth planet of the Solar System, was proposed in 2014 by the same team of astronomers that are now been detected at Farout.

“2018 VG18 is much further away and moves more slowly than any other observed object in the Solar System, so it takes a few years to determine its orbit. However, it has been located in the same region of the sky for other objects ends of the Solar System, suggesting that it could follow an orbit similar to that of the majority of these bodies,” explains Sheppard in the press release.

R. MOLAR

For the moment, he adds David Tholen, a researcher from the University of Hawaii and one of the discoverers, all they know is that this dwarf planet is “extremely out of the Sun, its approximate diameter, and its color. So, its brightness suggests that measures about 500 kilometers in diameter, its shape, which is probably spherical and that has shades of pink, a color generally associated with bodies that contain large amounts of ice.

“Because of the large distance to the is located”, says Tholen, “it will probably take more than a thousand years to make one revolution around the Sun”.

According to the criteria of

Learn more