[Image: Flickr]
The solar system’s map needs some revision after astronomers discovered a new icy world, temporarily named 2017 OF201, believed to be a distant cousin of Pluto.
And scientists mean “distant” quite literally. At its farthest point, it’s more than 1,600 times the distance of Earth from the sun. At its closest, it’s still 44.5 times farther than Earth.
At roughly 435 miles wide, 2017 OF201 could qualify as a dwarf planet, the same designation Pluto has had since its demotion from ninth planet in 2006.
What makes 2017 OF201 stand out is its very stretched-out path around the sun, which takes an incredible 25,000 Earth-years to complete. For comparison, Pluto makes a lap around the sun every 248 Earth years.
Cheng, together with graduate students from Princeton University, discovered the potential dwarf planet while searching for the elusive “Planet 9”, a hypothetical world believed to cause the unusual clustering of distant objects beyond Neptune. The existence of 2017 OF201 might now suggest that Planet 9 or X doesn’t exist.
To make the find, the team analysed years of astronomical images captured by the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Using computer programs, they tracked faint, slow-moving points of light across the sky, eventually connecting them to reveal the object.
The fact that we’re still finding new celestial bodies in old data shows how little we truly know about our own backyard.
[Source: Mashable]
