Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- The solar system’s starting to look very different than we thought.
- A third object beyond Pluto has just been announced.
- The newly discovered dwarf, dubbed “The Goblin,” never comes closer than 65 astronomical units, or AU, to the sun.
Beyond the fringes of our known solar system orbits a newly discovered object, 2015 TG387.
Its nickname? The Goblin. It has an extremely elongated orbit, never coming closer to the Sun than about 65 astronomical units, or AU. (Each AU is the distance from the Earth’s to the Sun.) Pluto, by way of comparison, is about 34 AU. At its most distant, 2015 TG387 gets about 2,300 AU out from the Sun. TG387 was discovered by Carnegie Institute for Science’s Scott Sheppard, Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen, and revealed this month. It may provide yet another clue that there’s a Planet X too far out for us to see.Planet X breadcrumbs
2015 TG387 has the third most most distant parhelion — its orbit’s closest point to the Sun — of the distant objects we’ve begun to detect. The most distant? That honor goes to another object that Sheppard and Trujillo found, 2012 VP113, which gets only as near 80 AU to the sun. Sedna takes second place, with a 76 AU parhelion.
According to Tholen, speaking to Carnegie Science, “We think there could be thousands of small bodies like 2015 TG387 out on the Solar System’s fringes, but their distance makes finding them very difficult.” In addition to their closest points being…
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