New Dwarf Planet Found at Solar System's Edge, Hints at Possible Faraway 'Planet

[Buster's Uncle]

New Dwarf Planet Found at Solar System's Edge, Hints at Possible Faraway 'Planet X'
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  4 hours ago



Astronomers have found a new dwarf planet far beyond Pluto's orbit, suggesting that this distant realm contains millions of undiscovered objects — including, perhaps, a world larger than Earth.

The newfound celestial body, called 2012 VP113, joins the dwarf planet Sedna as a confirmed resident of a far-flung and largely unexplored region scientists call the "inner Oort Cloud." Further, 2012 VP113 and Sedna may have been pulled into their long, looping orbits by a big planet lurking unseen in these frigid depths.

"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," study co-author Chadwick Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, told Space.com. "They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually know about the solar system."


Probing the depths

For several decades, astronomers have divided our solar system into three main parts: an inner zone containing the rocky planets, such as Earth and Mars; a middle realm housing the gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune; and an outer region called the Kuiper Belt, populated by distant and icy worlds like Pluto.

The discovery of Sedna in 2003 hinted that this map is incomplete. Sedna, which is about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide, has an incredibly elliptical orbit, coming no closer to the sun than 76 astronomical units (AU) and going all the way out to 940 AU or so at its most distant point. (One AU, the distance from Earth to the sun, is about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)



The discovery images of 2012 VP113, which has the most distant orbit known in our Solar System. Three images of the night sky, each taken about 2 hours apart, were combined into one. The first image was artificially colored red, second green


That puts Sedna in the far outer reaches of the solar system. For comparison, Pluto's orbit takes it between 29 and 49 AU from the sun. [Photos of Pluto and Its Moons]

And now astronomers know Sedna is not alone out there. Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., discovered 2012 VP113 using the Dark Energy Camera, which is installed on a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Follow-up observations by the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, also in Chile, helped Trujillo and Sheppard determine details of 2012 VP113's orbit and learn a bit more about the object.

The body comes no closer to the sun than 80 AU, and it gets as far away as 452 AU. About 280 miles (450 km) wide, 2012 VP113 is large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet if it's composed primarily of ice, researchers said. (By definition, dwarf planets must be big enough for their gravity to mold them into spheres; the mass required for this to happen depends upon the objects' composition.)



These images show the discovery of the new inner Oort cloud object 2012 VP113 taken about 2 hours apart on UT November 5, 2012. The motion of 2012 VP113 clearly stands out compared to the steady state background stars and galaxies.


The inner Oort Cloud

Objects as distant as Sedna and 2012 VP113 are incredibly difficult to detect; astronomers really only get a chance when the bodies near their closest approach to the sun. [Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets]

Based on the amount of sky the scientists searched, Trujillo and Sheppard estimate that about 900 bodies larger than Sedna may exist in this faraway realm, which the astronomers dub the inner Oort Cloud. (The true Oort Cloud is an icy shell around the solar system that lies perhaps 50,0000 AU from the sun and contains trillions of comets.)

The total population of objects in the inner Oort Cloud, in fact, may exceed that of the Kuiper Belt and the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, researchers said.

?"Some of these inner Oort Cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth," Sheppard said in a statement. "This is because many of the inner Oort Cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology."

The study was published online today (March 26) in the journal Nature.



Orbit diagram for the outer solar system. The sun and terrestrial planets are at the center. The orbits of the four giant planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are shown by purple solid circles. The Kuiper Belt (including Pluto) is shown


Planet X?

Astronomers don't know much about the origin or evolutionary history of Sedna and 2012 VP113 at this point. The objects may have formed closer to the sun, for example, before getting pushed out by gravitational interactions with other stars — perhaps "sister stars" from the sun's birth cluster, researchers said. Or inner Oort Cloud objects may be alien bodies that the sun plucked from another solar system during a stellar close encounter.

It's also possible that 2012 VP113 and its neighbors were knocked from the Kuiper Belt to the inner Oort Cloud when a big planet was booted outward long ago. This planet may have been ejected from the solar system entirely, or it may still be there in the extreme outer reaches, waiting to be discovered.

Indeed, certain characteristics of the orbits of Sedna, 2012 VP113 and several of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects are consistent with the continued presence of a big and extremely faraway "perturber," researchers said. It's possible that a planet roughly 10 times more massive than Earth located hundreds of AU from the sun is shepherding these bodies into their current orbits.

Such supposition is far from proof that an undiscovered "Planet X" actually exists, Trujillo stressed. But he did say that the door is open, noting that an Earth-mass body at 250 AU from the sun would likely be undetectable at present.

"It raises the possibility that there could be stuff out there of significant mass, Earth-mass or larger, that we don't know about," he said.

The picture should clear up as more inner Oort Cloud objects are found, allowing astronomers to put more constraints on the origin and orbital evolution of these frigid, distant bodies.

"I think it's a little hard to draw firm conclusions from two objects," Trujillo said. "If we were to have 10 inner Oort Cloud objects, then we could really start saying detailed things about the formation scenarios."


http://news.yahoo.com/dwarf-planet-found-solar-systems-edge-hints-possible-182038618.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Newfound pink world lurks at solar system fringes
Associated Press
By ALICIA CHANG  3 hours ago



This combination of images provided by the Carnegie Institution for Science shows a new solar system object dubbed 2012 VP113, indicated by the yellow arrow, that was observed on November 2012 through a telescope in Chile. New research published in the journal Nature reveals it’s the second object to be discovered in the far reaches of the solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. (AP Photo/Carnegie Institution for Science, Scott S. Sheppard)



LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peering into the far reaches of the solar system, astronomers have spied a pink frozen world 7½ billion miles from the sun.

It's the second such object to be discovered in a region of space beyond Pluto long considered a celestial wasteland. Until now, the lone known resident in this part of the solar system was an oddball dwarf planet spotted in 2003 named Sedna after the mythological Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic.

The latest discovery shows "Sedna is not a freak. We can have confidence that there is a new population to explore," Yale University senior research scientist David Rabinowitz said in an email. He was one of Sedna's discoverers, but had no role in the new find detailed in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

For years, astronomers hunted in vain for other Sednas in the little-studied fringes of the solar system.

The new object, 2012 VP113, was tracked using a new camera on a ground telescope in Chile by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. Trujillo was part of the team that found Sedna.

Like Sedna, VP is also a dwarf planet. It's jokingly nicknamed "Biden" after Vice President Joe Biden because of the object's initials. It measures about 280 miles across, or half the diameter of Sedna. It's bone-chilling cold with a temperature of around minus 430 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unlike red and shiny Sedna, the newfound object is more pink and much fainter, which made it hard to detect.

By contrast, Earth is about 7,900 miles across and located 93 million miles from the sun.

Sedna and VP reside in what's known as the inner Oort cloud in the outer edge of the solar system where some comets such as the sun-diving Comet ISON are thought to originate. ISON broke apart last year after brushing too close to the sun.

"Finding Sedna so far away seemed odd and potentially a fluke. But this one is beginning to make it look like that might be a typical place for objects to be. Not at all what I would have guessed," Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said in an email.

Brown, self-proclaimed "Pluto killer," led the Sedna team, but was not part of the new discovery.

Far from being deserted, Sheppard and Trujillo estimate there are probably thousands of similar objects in the inner Oort cloud.

"These objects are not unique. There's a huge number out there," Sheppard said.

Not all of them will be visible to telescopes because they're so far away and it takes a long time for them to swing by the sun. Sedna and VP were spotted at their closest approach to the sun, which allowed light from the sun to hit the objects and bounce back to observatories on Earth.

VP is currently the third farthest object in the solar system after dwarf planet Eris and Sedna, but it has an eccentric, elongated orbit that can take it out to 42 billion miles from the sun. Sedna can loop out as far as 84 billion miles from the sun at its farthest point.

Now that Sedna has company — and likely lots of them — scientists are searching for more objects in an effort to learn how they and the solar system formed and evolved.

In a separate discovery published in Nature, a team led by Felipe Braga-Ribas of the National Observatory in Brazil found a pair of rings around an asteroid-like interloper in the outer system named Chariklo.

While not as dazzling as Saturn's rings, it's the first time rings have been discovered outside of the four gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. How little Chariklo got its rings remains a mystery, but scientists think they may have formed from debris from a violent collision.

___

Online:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature


http://news.yahoo.com/newfound-pink-world-lurks-solar-system-fringes-180746924.html

...

I believe it is FAR from 'second'...

[Buster's Uncle]

Newly Discovered Dwarf Planet Hints at 'Super Earth' in Far Reaches of Solar System
ABC News
By JON M. CHANG  3 hours ago






There's more to the solar system beyond Pluto's orbit. Researchers have discovered a new dwarf planet nearly 7.5 billion miles away from the sun.

Even more intriguing, the discovery suggests the possibility of a "Super Earth" -- objects several times the mass of the Earth -- orbiting the sun at such vast distances that the sun would appear as just another star.

The planet, currently called 2012 VP113, provides astronomers a hint that a whole class of other planets could be waiting to be discovered. Scientists call it "VP" for short, or "Biden," after Vice President Joe Biden.

Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., described the planet as approximately 450 kilometers in size with a faint red hue. "It has a temperature around 15 degrees Kelvin," or -432 degrees Fahrenheit, he told ABC News. "If you were on its surface, the sun would look just like any other star in the night sky."

Even though 2012 VP113 is the new guy on the block, it's not alone. Its closest neighbor is Sedna, another dwarf planet that exists past the Kuiper Belt, approximately 4 billion miles from the sun. "When the Kuiper belt ends, it's like no man's land," said Sheppard. "No one was expecting to find anything out there."

When Sedna was discovered in 2003, scientists didn't know whether it was a unique object or the first glimpse at a new class of celestial objects. With 2012 VP113's discovery, Sheppard is confident that there are more planet-like objects out there. "Sedna and VP113 are just the tip of the iceberg," he said.

It's not just the planets' existences themselves that has Sheppard intrigued, but their orbits as well. "These orbits are very elongated and eccentric," he said. "What we currently know about the solar system can't create the orbits of these objects. It means that something was vastly different in our solar system back then."

Sheppard's research can be found in the most recent issue of the journal Nature.


http://news.yahoo.com/newly-discovered-dwarf-planet-hints-super-earth-far-004906587--abc-news-tech.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Astronomers find mini-planet in solar system's backyard
Reuters
By Irene Klotz  6 hours ago



CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronomers have found a dwarf planet far beyond the orbit of Pluto and can only guess how it got there.

The diminutive world, provisionally called "2012 VP 113" by the international Minor Planet Center, is estimated to be about 280 miles in diameter, less than half the size of a neighboring dwarf planet named Sedna discovered a decade ago.

Sedna and VP 113 are the first objects found in a region of the solar system previously believed to be devoid of planetary bodies.

The proverbial no-man's land extended from the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt, home to the dwarf planet Pluto and more than 1,000 other small icy bodies, to the comet-rich Oort Cloud, which orbits the sun some 10,000 times farther away than Earth.

"When Sedna was discovered 10 years ago it kind of redefined what we thought about the solar system," astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C. said in an interview.

Nothing in the appearance of the modern-day solar system can account for Sedna and VP 113's existence, say astronomers who published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Sedna's 11,400-year orbit takes it only as close as 76 times the distance that Earth orbits the sun. VP 113's closest approach is 80 times as far as Earth's orbit of the sun - roughly twice as far as the Kuiper Belt.

"In the current architecture of the solar system, Sedna and 2012 VP113 should not be there," writes astronomer Megan Schwamb, of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, in a separate Nature article.

Computer simulations provide a few potential scenarios.

Lead researcher Chad Trujillo favors the idea that a sibling star forming in the same stellar nursery as the sun gravitationally elbowed some Oort Cloud residents inward as it flew by.

Sheppard suggests that another planet at least as massive as Earth got bumped out of the solar system, taking some Kuiper Belt bodies with it along the way.

That renegade planet or planets actually may still be lurking in the farthest reaches of the solar system, too dim and

remote to be detected by currently available telescopes and cameras, Sheppard said.

A third option is that the sun has a companion, something five- to 10 times the mass of Earth, whose gravity is pinning Sedna, VP 113 and potentially millions of other dwarf-like planets in unusual and distant orbits.

"With our discovery of one more object, we can't rule out one theory or another," Trujillo said.

More residents of the region, now known as the inner Oort Cloud, soon may make their presence known.

Astronomers are working to confirm six other Sedna-like objects found last year. That requires imaging the mini-planets several times over a year or longer to measure how much they have moved relative to background stars.

"They're really hard to find," Trujillo said.

Astronomers suspect there may be 150 million Sedna-like dwarf planets measuring between 31 and 5,000 miles in diameter, a larger population than the Kuiper Belt objects.


http://news.yahoo.com/astronomers-mini-planet-solar-systems-backyard-214516161.html