What astronomers believed to be the most distant object in the solar system, “Farout,” lost its title after only two years. This crown now goes to “Farfarout” (zero points for creativity, boys), a planetoid that is more than 130 times farther from the Sun than Earth.
As seen by Inverse, after years of observations, confirmed the astronomers that the planetoid designated by the Minor Planet Center as 2018 AG37, nicknamed Farfarout, is the farthest object in the solar system known 132 astronomical units away from the Sun.
A single AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun, aka about 148 million kilometers. (For reference, the previous title Farout, officially designated 2018 VG18, is “only” 120 AU distance.) This means that Farfarout is about 12.3 billion miles or 19.7 billion kilometers away or, contextually, about four times farther from the Sun than Pluto. At this distance, the planetoid completes a single orbit around the Sun only once in a millennium.
“Because of this long orbital period, it moves very slowly in the sky, requiring several years of observation to accurately determine its trajectory,” said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy and a member of the team behind the discovery. said in a statement this week.
the team – Tholen, Carnegie Institution of Science Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo of the University of Northern Arizona – initially saw the 2018 asteroid using the 8-meter Subaru telescope located above the latent Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. In the years that followed, they used the Gemini North Telescope, also located on Mauna Kea, and the Magellan Telescope in Chile to determine the Farfarout orbit and confirm its status as the most distant object known in our solar system.
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“The Farfarout discovery shows our growing ability to map the outer solar system and look farther and farther toward the edges of our solar system,” Sheppard said in a statement this week. “Only with the progress made in recent years in large digital cameras on very large telescopes has it been possible to effectively detect very distant objects such as Farfarout.”
There are still many things that scientists do not know about this incredibly distant planetoid, but they have discovered some clues in their research. The team believes it is at the “low end” of the dwarf planet’s ladder “assuming it is an object rich in ice” and has an estimated diameter of about 400 km. It has an incredibly elongated orbit that intersects with Neptune, which has led scientists to speculate that Farfarout may once have been a much closer planetary neighbor, but it drifted too close to Neptune and was thrown out of the system. our solar celestial body gravity much higher.
Astronomers believe that studying Farfarout can provide insight into how Neptune formed and evolved in our solar system, and the two are likely to interact again due to their intersecting orbits.
It is not certain how long Farfarout will hold its title, especially given the rapid progress of our terrestrial telescopes. Sheppard called the planetoid “just the tip of the iceberg of objects in the very distant solar system.” Who knows, maybe by this year next year we will have a FarfarFAR AWAYon our hands.