Dec 18, 2018 05:31 AM
It's officially labeled 2018 VG18, but the astronomers have unofficially named it "Farout"
It was recently discovered by astronomers at the Carnegie Institution, the U. of Hawaii and Northern Arizona U. who were busily looking for the Mysterious Planet X, the large massive Neptune-sized planet hypothesized to be out there in the Kuiper Belt somewhere.
This isn't Planet X, it's apparently another Pluto-like minor planet. They say "The Magellan [a large ground-based optical telescope] observations confirmed that 2018 VG18 is around 120 AU, making it the first Solar System object observed beyond 100 AU. [Pluto is currently at about 34 A.U., so this thing is about 3x as distant from the Sun.] Its brightness suggests that it is about 500 km in diameter, making it spherical in shape and a dwarf planet. It has a pinkish hue, a color generally associated with ice-rich objects."
There's lots of stuff out there beyond Pluto and the Solar System doesn't simply end at Pluto at all like we all once thought. I don't think that anyone really knows how far out into interstellar space the Solar System extends. There might be things very loosely attached by gravity to our Sun way out in interstellar space, halfway to the nearest stars. Which makes me speculate that perhaps the empty void of interstellar space has lots of stuff in it, cold dark places we know nothing about, but bad news if an interstellar spaceship moving at almost light-speed hits one.
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2428
It was recently discovered by astronomers at the Carnegie Institution, the U. of Hawaii and Northern Arizona U. who were busily looking for the Mysterious Planet X, the large massive Neptune-sized planet hypothesized to be out there in the Kuiper Belt somewhere.
This isn't Planet X, it's apparently another Pluto-like minor planet. They say "The Magellan [a large ground-based optical telescope] observations confirmed that 2018 VG18 is around 120 AU, making it the first Solar System object observed beyond 100 AU. [Pluto is currently at about 34 A.U., so this thing is about 3x as distant from the Sun.] Its brightness suggests that it is about 500 km in diameter, making it spherical in shape and a dwarf planet. It has a pinkish hue, a color generally associated with ice-rich objects."
There's lots of stuff out there beyond Pluto and the Solar System doesn't simply end at Pluto at all like we all once thought. I don't think that anyone really knows how far out into interstellar space the Solar System extends. There might be things very loosely attached by gravity to our Sun way out in interstellar space, halfway to the nearest stars. Which makes me speculate that perhaps the empty void of interstellar space has lots of stuff in it, cold dark places we know nothing about, but bad news if an interstellar spaceship moving at almost light-speed hits one.
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2428
