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Perhaps the gravity of the ninth planet attracts objects at the edge of the solar system?
The new objects were noticed during the Dark Energy Survey, which was released in 2013, reports livescience.com. During the six years of observation, 817 new objects were found using the Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo, Chile. 461 of them are described for the first time in a work published by arXiv, which has not yet been reviewed.
Neptune. Photo by NASA / ESA / Hubble / New Horizons
All the objects in question are at least 30 astronomical units from our planet and roam the region of the solar system, which is almost unimaginably dark and remote, beyond Neptune. More than 3,000 were found there. transneptune objects. These include the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris, as well as small objects in the Kuiper Belt (the area of the solar system 30 to 50 astronomical units from the Sun) like Arrokoth, through which in 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft flew.
Among the objects just described are also exceptional. Nine are called extreme transneptune objects. Their orbits are at least 150 astronomical units from the Sun. The orbits of the four objects are even more extreme, at 230 astronomical units. At such a long distance, objects are virtually unaffected by Neptune’s gravity, but strange orbits indicate effects outside the solar system.
Some scientists believe that it may be a planet yet to be discovered. Others are convinced that the strange orbits can be explained by the total gravity of many small objects or simply by a statistical anomaly. Therefore, these objects could help researchers discover the ninth planet or deny its existence.
By the way, the solar system is made up of 8 planets, because in the 1930s. After the discovery of Pluto in 2006, the solar system was considered to consist of 9 planets, but with the discovery of Eridius, Pluto and her and others similar bodies in 2006. By decision of the International Union of Astronomers, they were classified as dwarf planets.
Neptune. Photo by NASA / ESA / Hubble / New Horizons
Additionally, the study authors found four new Trojans for Neptune. Trojans are objects that orbit around a planet or satellite. In this case, they travel with Neptune around the Sun. The researchers also observed a Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet named after Gary Bernstein, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Pedro Bernardinelli, a doctoral student at the University of Washington.
They were the first to spot a comet in the Dark Energy Survey dataset. The width of this comet can reach 160 kilometers. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein flew from Comet Oorto’s cloud even further than the Kuiper belt.
Pluto. Photo by NASA / ESA / Hubble / New Horizons
At least 155 newly discovered objects are far enough away from Neptune that they are barely affected by the planet’s gravity, and they don’t escape the solar system just because of the Sun’s gravity. These very distant objects often have large elliptical orbits.
The findings are really exciting, the researchers said in their work, because the Dark Energy Survey was not designed to search for trans-Neptune objects. Its purpose is to describe the theoretical dark energy that influences the accelerated expansion of the universe. However, the data collected during the Dark Energy Survey is 20%. of all currently known trans-Neptune objects.
“This information will be useful for more detailed statistical testing of trans-neptune object formation models,” the study authors noted.
Sources:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03758
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