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Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Planet Nine? Not quite, but some astronomers think they've spotted a new dwarf planet
A possible new dwarf planet has been discovered at the edge of our solar system, so far-flung that it takes around 25,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The object, known as 2017 OF201, was found by researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University who were searching for 'Planet Nine,' a hypothetical planet larger than Earth that is thought to orbit beyond Neptune. Some astronomers theorize that a mysterious ninth planet, which so far remains undetected, could explain an unusual clustering of objects and other anomalies observed in the outer solar system. In searching for the elusive Planet Nine, researchers instead turned up a different resident in our cosmic backyard. 'It's not very different from how Pluto was discovered,' said Sihao Cheng, a member at the Institute for Advanced Study who led the research team. 'This project was really an adventure.' If confirmed, the newfound dwarf planet would be what Cheng calls an 'extreme cousin' of Pluto. The findings were published on the preprint website arXiv and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Cheng and his colleagues estimate that 2017 OF201 measures about 435 miles across — significantly smaller than Pluto, which measures nearly 1,500 miles across. A dwarf planet is classified as a celestial body that orbits the sun that has enough mass and gravity to be mostly round, but unlike other planets, has not cleared its orbital path of asteroids and other objects. Eritas Yang, one of the study's co-authors and a graduate student at Princeton University, said that one of 2017 OF201's most interesting features is its extremely elongated orbit. At its farthest point from the sun, the object is more than 1,600 times more distant than the Earth is to the sun. The researchers found the dwarf planet candidate by meticulously sifting through a huge data set from a telescope in Chile that was scanning the universe for evidence of dark energy. By cobbling together observations over time, the researchers identified a moving object with migrations that followed a clear pattern. 2017 OF201 is likely one of the most distant visible objects in the solar system, but its discovery suggests there could be other dwarf planets populating that region of space. 'We were using public data that has been there for a long time,' said Jiaxuan Li, a study co-author and a graduate student at Princeton University. 'It was just hidden there.' Li said the object is close to the sun at the moment, which means the researchers need to wait about a month before they can conduct follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes. The scientists are also hopeful that they can eventually secure some time to study the object with the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. In the meantime, Cheng said he hasn't given up searching for Planet Nine. The new discovery, however, may throw a wrench into some long-standing theories of the planet's existence. The hypothesis behind Planet Nine is that a planet several times the size of Earth in the outer solar system could explain why a group of icy objects seem to have unusually clustered orbits. 'Under the influence of Planet Nine, all objects that do not have this specific orbital geometry will eventually become unstable and get kicked out of the solar system,' Yang said. 2017 OF201's elongated orbit makes it an outlier from the clustered objects, but Yang's calculations suggest that the orbit of 2017 OF201 should remain stable over roughly the next billion years. In other words, 2017 OF201 likely would not be able to remain if Planet Nine does exist. But Yang said more research is needed, and the discovery of the new dwarf planet candidate is not necessarily a death knell for Planet Nine. For one, the simulations only used one specific location for Planet Nine, but scientists don't all agree on where the hypothetical planet lurks — if it's there at all. Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, proposed the existence of Planet Nine in a study published with his Caltech colleague Mike Brown in 2016. He said the discovery of 2017 OF201 doesn't prove or disprove the theory. The objects in the outer solar system that are likely to show a footprint of Planet Nine's gravity, Batygin said, are the ones where the closest points on their orbits around the sun are still distant enough that they don't strongly interact with Neptune. 'This one, unfortunately, does not fall into that category,' Batygin told NBC News. 'This object is on a chaotic orbit, and so when it comes to the question of 'What does it really mean for Planet Nine?' The answer is not very much, because it's chaotic.' Batygin said he was excited to see the new study because it adds more context to how objects came to be in the outer solar system, and he called the researchers' efforts mining public data sets 'heroic.' Cheng, for his part, said he hasn't abandoned hope of finding Planet Nine. 'This whole project started as a search for Planet Nine, and I'm still in that mode,' he said. 'But this is an interesting story for scientific discovery. Who knows if Planet Nine exists, but it can be interesting if you're willing to take some risks.' This article was originally published on
Yahoo
7 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Scientists found a possible new dwarf planet — it could spell bad news for Planet 9 fans
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A potential new dwarf planet has been discovered in the outer reaches of the solar system, and its existence poses the greatest challenge yet to the hypothesis that a ninth planet lurks far from the sun. "We were very excited to discover 2017 OF201 because it was not expected at all," study leader Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, told "It's very rare to discover an object both large and with an exotic orbit." "The object's aphelion — the farthest point on the orbit from the sun – is more than 1,600 times that of the Earth's orbit," Cheng explained in a statement. "Meanwhile its perihelion — the closest point on its orbit to the sun — is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit." We're learning more and more about the outer solar system. Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt; a ring of icy cometary nuclei and planetesimals dominated by Pluto and Charon. The Kuiper Belt begins about 30 astronomical units (AU) from the sun (one AU is the distance of Earth from the sun), its inner edge guarded by Neptune, and extends out to 50 AU. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt. Meanwhile, the twin Voyager spacecraft have already sped through the Kuiper Belt and have entered a realm called the Scattered Disk, which is thought to go all through way out to more than 1,000 AU and is home to icy bodies on highly elongated and highly inclined orbits. These objects were literally scattered in the region through gravitational interactions with Neptune, and have had their orbits further modified via torques induced by the gravity of passing stars, or the "galactic tide" (the overall gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy). Beyond the Scattered Disk is the Oort Cloud, which is an immense volume of space that possibly stretches up to a light-year from the sun and is the source of long-period comets. However, much about the Scattered Disk is still unknown, and besides those long-period comets that venture this way every now and then, no Oort Cloud object has ever been seen — they are too far away and too small. This is why every discovery of a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) on a greatly elongated orbit is vital for piecing together the mystery of the outer solar system. Around 5,000 TNOs have been discovered until now, but the latest discovery may be one of the most important. Known as 2017 OF201, it is currently 90.5 AU away from the sun, but its orbit brings it as close as 4.14 billion miles (6.66 billion kilometers) from our star and as far away as a whopping 157 billion miles (244 billion kilometers). from the sun. For the vast majority of its 24,256-year orbit, 2017 OF201 is too far away to be seen with current telescopes; it could only be discovered because its last perihelion came in 1930, and that it's still relatively close. The object's last perihelion also came, coincidentally, during the same year that Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto with a 13-inch (330mm) telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Would it have been possible for Tombaugh to have also found 2017 OF201? Probably not — at magnitude +20.1, this object would have been four magnitudes fainter than Pluto, and it is even fainter today. Fortunately, telescopic technology has come a long way in the past 95 years, with deep surveys that can capture the passage of a faint object. For example, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has identified about 800 TNOs — and that's even though DES is ostensibly a cosmological survey. In the same vein, Cheng, along with Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang of Princeton University, have been scrutinizing observations made by the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) on the Victor M. Blanco 13-foot (4-meter) telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. They discovered 2017 OF201 in archive data going back to 2017 from DECaLS, and also spotted it in old data dating from 2011–12 captured by the 11.7-foot) (3.58-meter) Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Based on its brightness and its expected albedo of 0.15 (meaning it would reflect just 15% of the sunlight incident upon it), Cheng's team calculated that 2017 OF201 is probably about 435 miles (700 kilometers)) across. This would make it the second largest object found on such an elongated orbit. Although it is substantially smaller than Pluto, which is 1,477 miles (2,377 km) across, 2017 OF201 is nevertheless large enough to be classified as a dwarf planet. However, 2017 OF201's existence contradicts the Planet Nine hypothesis, based on our best guess as to Planet Nine's orbit. Planet Nine is a concept that was introduced in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin to explain a perceived clustering of the orbits of many extreme TNOs. The gravity of Planet Nine, which is speculated to be a super-Earth or modest ice giant, would be influencing the orbits of extreme TNOs — or so the hypothesis goes. Yet, the orbit of 2017 OF201 is not clustered with the others. "Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF201 deviates from this," Jiaxuan Li said in the statement. In our e-mail interview with Cheng, he laid out the repercussions that this could have for the existence of Planet Nine's orbit. "Planet Nine does allow for extreme TNOs to have unclustered orbits, but those orbits are not stable," he said. The timescale in which Planet Nine would render 2017 OF201's orbit unstable, and kick it out of the solar system, is in the region of 100 million years. However, the process of placing 2017 OF201 in its current orbit, through gravitational interactions with Neptune that pushed 2017 OF201 out of the Kuiper Belt — followed by nudges from the galactic tide — takes billions of years. It's possible that 2017 OF201 has only recently arrived in its current orbit, which would mean Planet Nine might not have had time to disrupt its orbit yet. "One important thing is to see if the orbit of our object is stable," Cheng said. "I think, based on analytical criteria, our object is at the boundary between stable and unstable, so further investigation with more comprehensive simulations is needed to definitively rule out the Planet Nine hypothesis." Related Stories: — Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart — Hubble Telescope discovers a new '3-body problem' puzzle among Kuiper Belt asteroids — 2nd Kuiper Belt? Our solar system may be much larger than thought Intriguingly, 2017 OF201 is probably not alone in the outer solar system. It's purely by chance that it happens to be close enough to be detectable — for 99% of its 24,256-year orbit it is too far away to be seen. "2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable," said Cheng. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbits and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now. Just think of that: There could be hundreds of dwarf planets in the outermost reaches of the solar system. "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," said Cheng. A pre-print of a paper describing the discovery is available on arXiv.
CBS News
29-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
Search for elusive "Planet Nine" takes surprising twist, astronomers say
It's an evocative idea that has long bedeviled scientists: a huge and mysterious planet is lurking in the darkness at the edge of our solar system, evading all our efforts to spot it. Some astronomers say the strange, clustered orbits of icy rocks beyond Neptune indicate that something big is out there, which they have dubbed "Planet Nine." Now, a U.S.-based trio hunting the elusive world has instead stumbled on what appears to be a new dwarf planet in the solar system's outer reaches. And the existence of the new kid on the block could challenge the Planet Nine theory, the researchers have calculated. Named 2017 OF201, the new object is roughly 430 miles across, according to a preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed and was published online last week. That makes it three times smaller than Pluto. An extraordinary dwarf planet discovered at the edge of our solar system @the_IAS — Tech Explorist (@TechExplorist) May 24, 2025 But that is still big enough to be considered a dwarf planet, lead study author Sihao Cheng of New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study told AFP. "Lucky" discovery The object is currently three times farther away from Earth than Neptune. Its extremely elongated orbit swings out more than 1,600 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, taking it into the ring of icy rocks around the solar system called the Oort cloud. It goes so far out, it could have passed by stars other than our sun in the past, Cheng said. During its 25,000-year orbit, the object is only close enough to Earth to be observed around 0.5 percent of the time, which is roughly a century. "It's already getting fainter and fainter," Cheng said. Artist rendering of what Planet Nine might look like CBS News The discovery suggests "there are many hundreds of similar things on similar orbits" in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, Cheng said. After taking a risk spending more than half a year sorting through a difficult dataset in search of Planet Nine, Cheng said he was "lucky" to have found anything at all. The researchers are requesting time to point the James Webb, Hubble and ALMA telescopes at their discovery. But Sam Deen, a 23-year-old amateur astronomer from California, has already been able to track the dwarf planet candidate through old datasets. "OF201 is, in my opinion, probably one of the most interesting discoveries in the outer solar system in the last decade," Deen told AFP. "See almost to the edge of the universe" The icy rocks discovered in the Kuiper belt tend to have a clustered orbit going in a particular direction. Two decades ago, astronomers proposed this was due to the gravitational pull of a world up to 10 times larger than Earth, naming it Planet Nine and kicking off a debate that has rumbled since. It is also sometimes called Planet X, a name proposed for a hypothetical world beyond Neptune more than a century ago. Back in 1930, astronomers were searching for Planet X when they discovered Pluto, which became our solar system's ninth planet. But Pluto turned out to be too tiny — it is smaller than the moon — and was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006. There are now four other officially recognized dwarf planets, and Cheng believes 2017 OF201 could join their ranks. When the researchers modeled its orbit, they found it did not follow the clustered trend of similar objects. This could pose a problem for the Planet Nine theory, but Cheng emphasized more data is needed. Samantha Lawler of Canada's University of Regina told AFP that this "great discovery" and others like it mean that "the original argument for Planet Nine is getting weaker and weaker." The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to go online in Chile this year, is expected to shed light on this mystery, one way or another. Deen said it was discouraging that no sign of Planet Nine has been found so far, but with Vera Rubin "on the horizon I don't think we'll have to wonder about its existence for much longer." For Cheng, he still hopes that this huge planet is out there somewhere. "We're in an era when big telescopes can see almost to the edge of the universe," he said. But what is in our "backyard" still largely remains unknown, he added. Cheng made the discovery alongside colleagues Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang from Princeton University, and Li said the newly found object demonstrates the power of open science. "All the data we used to identify and characterize this object are archival data that are available to anyone, not only professional astronomers," Li said in a statement. "This means that groundbreaking discoveries aren't limited to those with access to the world's largest telescopes. Any researcher, student, or even citizen scientist with the right tools and knowledge could have made this discovery, highlighting the value of sharing scientific resources." The new discovery was officially announced by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on May 21.
News.com.au
29-05-2025
- General
- News.com.au
The hunt for mysterious 'Planet Nine' offers up a surprise
It's an evocative idea that has long bedevilled scientists: a huge and mysterious planet is lurking in the darkness at the edge of our solar system, evading all our efforts to spot it. Some astronomers say the strange, clustered orbits of icy rocks beyond Neptune indicate that something big is out there, which they have dubbed Planet Nine. Now, a US-based trio hunting this elusive world has instead stumbled on what appears to be a new dwarf planet in the solar system's outer reaches. And the existence of this new kid on the block could challenge the Planet Nine theory, the researchers have calculated. Named 2017 OF201, the new object is roughly 700 kilometres (430 miles) across according to a preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed, published online last week. That makes it three times smaller than Pluto. But that is still big enough to be considered a dwarf planet, lead study author Sihao Cheng of New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study told AFP. - Distant traveller - The object is currently three times farther away from Earth than Neptune. And its extremely elongated orbit swings out more than 1,600 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, taking it into the ring of icy rocks around the solar system called the Oort cloud. It goes so far out, it could have passed by stars other than our Sun in the past, Cheng said. During its 25,000-year orbit, the object is only close enough to Earth to be observed around 0.5 percent of the time, which is roughly a century. "It's already getting fainter and fainter," Cheng said. The discovery suggests "there are many hundreds of similar things on similar orbits" in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, Cheng said. After taking a risk spending more than half a year sorting through a difficult dataset in search of Planet Nine, Cheng said he was "lucky" to have found anything at all. The researchers are requesting time to point the James Webb, Hubble and ALMA telescopes at their discovery. But Sam Deen, a 23-year-old amateur astronomer from California, has already been able to track the dwarf planet candidate through old datasets. "OF201 is, in my opinion, probably one of the most interesting discoveries in the outer solar system in the last decade," Deen told AFP. - What about Planet Nine? - The icy rocks discovered in the Kuiper belt tend to have a clustered orbit going in a particular direction. Two decades ago, astronomers proposed this was due to the gravitational pull of a world up to 10 times larger than Earth, naming it Planet Nine and kicking off a debate that has rumbled since. It is also sometimes called Planet X, a name proposed for a hypothetical world beyond Neptune more than a century ago. Back in 1930, astronomers were searching for Planet X when they discovered Pluto, which became our solar system's ninth planet. But Pluto turned out to be too tiny -- it is smaller than the Moon -- and was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006. There are now four other officially recognised dwarf planets, and Cheng believes 2017 OF201 could join their ranks. When the researchers modelled its orbit, they found it did not follow the clustered trend of similar objects. This could pose a problem for the Planet Nine theory, but Cheng emphasised more data is needed. Samantha Lawler of Canada's University of Regina told AFP that this "great discovery" and others like it mean that "the original argument for Planet Nine is getting weaker and weaker". The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to go online in Chile this year, is expected to shed light on this mystery, one way or another. Deen said it was discouraging that no sign of Planet Nine has been found so far, but with Vera Rubin "on the horizon I don't think we'll have to wonder about its existence for much longer". For Cheng, he still hopes that this huge planet is out there somewhere. "We're in an era when big telescopes can see almost to the edge of the universe," he said. But what is in our "backyard" still largely remains unknown, he added.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Pluto's 'extreme cousin' is a dwarf planet found at the far reaches of our solar system
Earth has a newly-discovered neighbor in the solar system. But the heavenly body – possibly a dwarf planet à la Pluto – isn't a frequent visitor. Located beyond Neptune, its extreme orbit circumnavigates the sun once every 25,000 years, taking it beyond our solar system. The new object, named 2017 OF201, was discovered by researchers in an astronomical image database while searching for trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and possible new planets in the outer solar system. Sihao Cheng, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences, led the team that discovered the object, which he described as an "extreme 'cousin' of Pluto," in a comment on his personal website. 2017 OF201 is about one-third the size of Pluto, which was reclassified as a dwarf planet in August 2006, and "is likely large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, and its orbit is extremely wide," Cheng said. Jupiter: Our solar system's biggest planet used to be twice as large: Study 'The object's aphelion – the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun – is more than 1600 times that of the Earth's orbit,' Cheng said in a synopsis of the findings posted May 22 on the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) website. "Meanwhile, its perihelion – the closest point on its orbit to the Sun – is 44.5 times that of the Earth's orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit." The researchers identified 2017 OF201 using 19 different astronomical database exposures, captured over seven years. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center officially announced the new object's discovery on May 21, the IAS said. 2017 OF201's extreme orbit makes it detectable about 1% of the time, the researchers said. Spotting 2017 OF201 beyond the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped section of space past the orbit of Neptune filled with icy debris, suggests the region may not be as empty as previously thought. "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,' Cheng said in the synopsis. '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.' The extreme orbit of 2017 OF201 also suggests the object "must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,' said Eritas Yang, a Princeton University graduate student who assisted in the research, in the study synopsis. More than one galactic event could have created 2017 OF201's orbit, Cheng added. "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," he said. The new object could also challenge the hypothesis that there's a "Planet X" or "Planet Nine" beyond Pluto, with gravity affecting dwarf planets and other objects in the Kuiper Belt. That's because 2017 OF201's orbit is "well outside the clustering observed in extreme (TNOs), which has been proposed as dynamical evidence for a distant, undetected planet," the researchers write in a draft version of their submitted research. "The existence of 2017 OF201 might suggest that Planet 9 or X doesn't exist," said Jiaxuan Li, another Princeton University astrophysical sciences grad student who collaborated on the research, on his personal website. But research will continue. "I hope Planet 9 still exists, because that'll be more interesting," Cheng told the New Scientist. Contributing: Doyle Rice and Elizabeth Weise. Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY's Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @ & @mikesnider & msnider@ What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Space oddity: New 'dwarf planet' found beyond Neptune
