Astronomers discover strange solar system body dancing in sync with Neptune: 'Like finding a hidden rhythm in a song'
Astronomers have found that a weird space rock at the edge of the solar system is locked in a rhythmic dance with Neptune.
The object, designated 2020 VN40, is part of a family of distant solar system objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2020 VN40 is the first object discovered that orbits the sun once for every ten orbits Neptune makes. Considering that one Neptunian year lasts 164.8 Earth years, that means 2020 VN40 has one heck of a long year, lasting around 1,648 years or 19,776 months on Earth!
The team behind this research thinks that 2020 VN40's ponderous orbital dance with Neptune may have come about when it was temporarily snared by the gravity of the ice giant planet. Thus, this discovery could help researchers better understand the dynamics of bodies at the edge of the solar system.
"This is a big step in understanding the outer solar system," team leader Rosemary Pike from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. "It shows that even very distant regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects, and it gives us new clues about how the solar system evolved."
The orbital rhythm of 2020 VN40 was discovered in data from the Large inclination Distant Objects (LiDO) survey. LiDO uses the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with backup from the Gemini Observatory and the Walter Baade Telescope to search the outer solar system for weird objects.
In particular, LiDO specializes in hunting TNOs with orbits that take them far above and below the orbital plane of Earth around the sun. These are regions of the solar system that have thus far only been sparsely explored by astronomers.
"It has been fascinating to learn how many small bodies in the solar system exist on these very large, very tilted orbits," LiDO team member and University of Regina researcher Samantha Lawler said.
The highly tilted path of 2020 VN40 finds it at an average distance from the sun equivalent to 140 times the distance between Earth and our star.
However, the most interesting element of the orbit of 2020 VN40 is its resonance with the orbit of Neptune. Other bodies rhythmically aligned with Neptune make their closest approaches to the sun, their perihelion, when Neptune is at its greatest distance from our star, or its aphelion.
Defying this trend, 2020 VN40 is at perihelion when Neptune is also close to the sun. That's if one were looking at it from above the solar system, with the tilt of 2020 VN40 meaning that this TNO and Neptune are not actually close together; the TNO is actually far below the solar system.
This also separates 2020 VN40 from other resonant TNOs, which tend to stay within the plane of the solar system when they make close approaches to the sun.
"This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew," team member and University of California Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. "It could change how we think about the way distant objects move."
Related Stories:
— Astronomers discover a cosmic 'fossil' at the edge of our solar system. Is this bad news for 'Planet 9'?
— Icy asteroids help the James Webb Space Telescope uncover Neptune's history
—Messenger comets might be why Earth has life, asteroid Ryugu samples suggest
Revealing the orbital strangeness of 2020 VN40 suggests that solar system objects with highly tilted orbits can adopt novel and unexpected types of movement.
The hunt is now on for more bodies like 2020 VN40, with the newly operating Vera C. Rubin Observatory set to play a key role in this investigation.
"This is just the beginning," team member and Planetary Science Institute researcher Kathryn Volk said. "We're opening a new window into the solar system's past."
The 2020 VN40 results were published on July 7 in The Planetary Science Journal.
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
A Rare Interstellar Object Is Zipping Through Our Solar System. This Brand-New Telescope Saw It First
Nearly a month ago, a mysterious object was seen hurtling through the solar system and later confirmed as an interstellar visitor traveling toward the Sun. Several telescopes have since turned their attention to the wandering object, but it turns out the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory was the first to catch a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS. In an act of cosmic serendipity, astronomers pointed the Rubin Observatory toward the patch of sky where the interstellar object appeared during its commissioning phase. Images captured by the observatory, perched atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, later revealed the comet in its full glory. Rubin's observations of 3I/ATLAS were recorded on June 21, around 10 days before its official discovery, according to a recent paper available on the preprint website arXiv. The Rubin Observatory, overseen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), boasts the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. Its car-sized, 3.2-gigapixel camera is designed to capture ultra-high-definition images and videos of the cosmos. The observatory unveiled its first images to the public on June 23, observing millions of galaxies and stars in the Milky Way over a period of just 10 hours. The images were not only beautiful—they also revealed supernovas and distant galaxies that could help astronomers study the universe's expansion. With its revolutionary precision, it's no wonder then that the Rubin Observatory captured the recently discovered comet before any other telescope. 3I/ATLAS was first spotted in data collected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) between June 25 and 29, and again on July 1. By July 2, the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, had seen it too. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center confirmed that this comet came from outside our solar system on July 2, marking the third discovery of an interstellar object. Since then, astronomers have been rushing to gather as much data as they can on the mysterious object. The Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii, recently snapped a close-up view of 3I/ATLAS, capturing the comet's coma in extreme detail. Initial observations of 3I/ATLAS suggest it's the oldest comet ever found, around 2 billion years older than our solar system. Compared to the two previously discovered interstellar objects, 'Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov, 3I/ATLAS is not only older, but it's also faster. A recent study, which has yet to undergo peer review, found that 3I/ATLAS has a hyperbolic velocity of about 37 miles per second (60 kilometers per second). Rubin's early observations of 3I/ATLAS are important considering they are the earliest images captured of the comet by a high-precision telescope. The new paper includes 49 images in total, although some were excluded because they were captured during Rubin's alignment sequence and were out of focus. Nineteen of the images were captured during intentional operations and confirm that 3I/ATLAS does in fact behave like a comet, with a cloud of gas and dust surrounding its icy nucleus, according to the paper. Just as it was the first to spot the comet, Rubin will also be the first to lose sight of it. On August 22, 3I/ATLAS will shift out of the area in the sky currently being watched by the observatory. Until then, the astronomers behind the paper will keep an eye out for the interstellar visitor in Rubin's images.
Wall Street Journal
2 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
A Cosmic Mystery: Is China Building the World's Biggest Telescope?
Astronomer Robert Kirshner investigates some of the universe's biggest questions: What happens when a star explodes? Is the universe still expanding? He recently added a new mystery to the list: Is China quietly building the world's biggest telescope? He would like to know, because he leads a rival telescope project in the U.S.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hubble Snaps Photos of Interstellar Invader
The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some spooky looking photos of our solar system's newest interstellar invader on the run. The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, was first spotted careening through the outer limits of the Sun's domain earlier this month, and appears to be a comet. Upon closer inspection, its speed was found to be so incredible that there could be no doubt of its extrasolar origins, making it only the third detected interstellar object in history. Tantalizingly, it's hurtling straight towards our system's center, giving astronomers ample time to study this cosmic interloper which may have come from the center of our galaxy — and thus, may be older than our entire solar system. And the Hubble just gave us a glimpse of what it looks like. An amateur astronomer who goes by the handle astrafoxen on Bluesky edited the images together and uploaded them as two short little timelapses, giving us an idea of its blazing speed. Relative to the Sun, 3I/ATLAS clocked in at about 137,000 miles per hour when it was first spotted, and it's only getting faster. The images within each set, it's worth noting, were taken just minutes apart on Monday. "Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy," astrafoxen wrote. Before 3I/ATLAS, the only known interstellar objects were 'Oumuamua, which was spotted in 2017 and famed for its cigar shape, and two years later Borisov, a comet that broke apart into massive chunks. Both have since veered back out into interstellar space. Much of 3I/ATLAS's fascinating nature remains uncertain, including how large it is. Being a suspected comet, it's surrounded by a luminous halo of gas and dust called a coma, which shrouds the solid object at its center. The coma can form a tail hundreds of thousands of miles long. Based on its speed and trajectory, though, 3I/ATLAS appears to have come from the galactic center, perhaps forming around another star before being booted out by a passing one. Some astronomers have speculated that ATLAS could be between three to 11 billion years old; it would need such a staggering timescale, they argue, to build up to the tremendous speed it's now exhibiting. The good news is that we caught sight of the comet pretty early on in its visit — 'Oumuamua practically had one foot out the door when it was detected — and it's still traveling towards the solar system's center. It's anticipated to reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, around October 30, at a distance of about 130 million miles. That buys us plenty of time to get a closer look at this thing and answer our most burning questions, including where in the Milky Way did it form — and, more luridly, whether it could possibly be an alien spacecraft. More on space: Scientists Say That Uranus Appears to Have a Girlfriend Solve the daily Crossword
