2017 OF201 is a freshly christened “minor planet” living way off in the outskirts of our solar system. It’s huge, cold, and its orbit is enormous.
First spotted lurking in archival data by a team led by Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study, 2017 OF201 finally earned some legitimacy from the International Astronomical Union on May 21. It’s got a diameter that could be anywhere from 290 to 510 miles.
If it’s closer to the 510, that means it’s nearly as big as Ceres, a dwarf planet in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
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Its orbit is what seems to have captured researchers’ attention. This thing loops out to 838 astronomical units from the Sun. For context, Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun in our solar system, is just 30 AU out. 2017 OF201 goes almost 30 times farther than that. At its closest, it’s still 45 AU away.
There’s even a nifty little acronym describing celestial bodies on these extreme elliptical paths: Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects, or ETNOs. Others include Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.
Its discovery poses an important question: Is this the fabled Planet Nine, the hypothetical gigantic planet with a strong gravitational pull that is proposed to exist on the outskirts of the solar system beyond Neptune?
Probably not. But it might be a breadcrumb that leads us toward the eventual discovery of a Planet Nine at some point down the line. For now, all we know is that we’ve got at least one more celestial neighbor hanging out way out in the boondocks of the solar system.
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