CasperParks
03-26-2014, 08:06 PM
Article at NBC News: Far Out! Icy World Widens Our Solar System's Frontier: (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/far-out-icy-world-widens-our-solar-systems-frontier-n62286)
More than a decade after an oddball world named Sedna was discovered on the solar system's far frontier, a fresh discovery reveals that it's not so odd after all. Sedna and the newly found object, called 2012 VP113, may well be the first of a huge new class of celestial bodies.
"This is definitely an evolving field that hopefully will start to get a lot more interesting," said co-discoverer Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Other researchers said the discovery of 2012 VP113 also revives speculation about a bigger world that may be orbiting the sun at a distance of tens of billions of miles, known as Planet X. "This actually is consistent with the existence of such a thing," said UCLA astronomer David Jewett, who did not play a role in the latest discovery.
Sheppard and Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, describe their find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. The discovery is based on a year's worth of observations from telescopes in Chile.
Eccentric and isolated
Like Sedna, 2012 VP113 traces an eccentric orbit that never comes anywhere close to the big planets we all know and love. Neptune, for example, lies 30 astronomical units away from the sun — in other words, 30 times farther away than the Earth-sun distance of 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). 2012 VP113 is more than twice as distant as Neptune. It comes no closer than 80 AU and ranges as far out as 452 AU.
That places the icy world in a region known as the inner Oort cloud, between the Kuiper Belt (a ring of icy worlds including Pluto, at 30 to 50 AU) and the outer Oort cloud (a vast haze of comets surrounding the sun, starting at about 1,500 AU). The zone is considered a "no-man's land" in the solar system.
Read more at: Article at NBC News: Far Out! Icy World Widens Our Solar System's Frontier: (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/far-out-icy-world-widens-our-solar-systems-frontier-n62286)
More than a decade after an oddball world named Sedna was discovered on the solar system's far frontier, a fresh discovery reveals that it's not so odd after all. Sedna and the newly found object, called 2012 VP113, may well be the first of a huge new class of celestial bodies.
"This is definitely an evolving field that hopefully will start to get a lot more interesting," said co-discoverer Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Other researchers said the discovery of 2012 VP113 also revives speculation about a bigger world that may be orbiting the sun at a distance of tens of billions of miles, known as Planet X. "This actually is consistent with the existence of such a thing," said UCLA astronomer David Jewett, who did not play a role in the latest discovery.
Sheppard and Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, describe their find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. The discovery is based on a year's worth of observations from telescopes in Chile.
Eccentric and isolated
Like Sedna, 2012 VP113 traces an eccentric orbit that never comes anywhere close to the big planets we all know and love. Neptune, for example, lies 30 astronomical units away from the sun — in other words, 30 times farther away than the Earth-sun distance of 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). 2012 VP113 is more than twice as distant as Neptune. It comes no closer than 80 AU and ranges as far out as 452 AU.
That places the icy world in a region known as the inner Oort cloud, between the Kuiper Belt (a ring of icy worlds including Pluto, at 30 to 50 AU) and the outer Oort cloud (a vast haze of comets surrounding the sun, starting at about 1,500 AU). The zone is considered a "no-man's land" in the solar system.
Read more at: Article at NBC News: Far Out! Icy World Widens Our Solar System's Frontier: (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/far-out-icy-world-widens-our-solar-systems-frontier-n62286)