There’s something behind Neptune. It’s a big object, and it seems to be orbiting the Sun in the opposite direction from everything else. Researchers have no idea what it is or where it came from, but one thing is certain: it’s weird.
According to data from EarthSky and the Rubin Observatory, this celestial weirdo goes by the temporary name R631. While Earth and everything else in the solar system orbit the Sun in a roughly flat pancake shape, this 62-mile-wide… Thing is cutting through the solar system at an extremely steep 142-degree angle, and all against the natural flow of the cosmos.
Scientists Just Discovered Something Very Strange Lurking Beyond Neptune
It makes no sense, especially given how our solar system formed billions of years ago. A massive cloud of dust flattened out and started spinning like a record. Everything born from that record started spinning in the same direction, and it’s been that way ever since. R631 just up and decided to spin the other way, actively ignoring the fundamental physics that everything else in our celestial neighborhood abides by.
This anomaly is currently sitting about 3 billion miles away and takes almost 548 years to make one full trip around our Sun. Since this rebel plays by its own rules, astronomers suspect it could be a massive comet, possibly from outside our solar system, that will start spewing gas when it makes its closest pass to the Sun in 2047.
Of course, the idea that it is from outside of our solar system is just one theory — that maybe it got kicked out of some neighboring star system and got sucked into our Sun’s gravity. The other option is that it was born and bred right here in our solar system but got flung into a reverse orbit after getting caught in a gravitational game of pinball with Neptune or Jupiter.
Researchers will keep a close eye on it for now, though we probably won’t learn much more about it for some time.
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