Scientists Just Announced a New Solar System Member – And It’s Unlike Anything We’ve Seen

Daily Galaxy ^ | May 23, 2025 | Staff

[Ezekiel]

they can’t be ceres about this.

It's really a religion with some folks.

Who do they think they Ar? Jason and the Hughgonauts?

[metmom]

Then don’t classify this new object as a planet either.

[rktman]

Got it.

[wally_bert]

Mondas.

[jonrick46]

I hope nothing bumps into 2017 OF201 that changes its elliptical orbit to set up a disastrous chain reaction threatening Earth. I hope the scientists are looking at that possibility.

[Redmen4ever]

Trans Neptune Orbit ... what are its pronouns?

[freefdny]

Just don’t say Barada Nikto.

[stremba]

That is very unlikely to happen. The new object, assuming it is large enough to be gravitationally rounded, would almost certainly be a dwarf planet, not a planet.

[SunkenCiv]

• 2017 OF 201 [Brave search]

[SunkenCiv]

The orientation or longitude of perihelion of 2017 OF201's orbit does not align with other extreme TNOs like Sedna, whose orbits are thought to be clustered because of the gravitational influence of a distant massive planet, dubbed Planet Nine. Simulations run by Cheng's team suggest that Planet Nine would have ejected 2017 OF201 from its current orbit within 100 million years, though 2017 OF201's current orbit could be a temporary state.[6][1][8] Konstantin Batygin, the co-author of the Planet Nine hypothesis, argued that the discovery of 2017 OF201 means nothing in relation to the hypothesis because the object's orbit is significantly influenced by Neptune.[10] Cheng, however, notes that 2017 OF201 "is right at the boundary between being stable and unstable."[10] Nevertheless, Cheng's team agree that their simulations do not disprove Planet Nine.[6] In an interview with The New York Times, Cheng "still thought Planet Nine was possible" while Yang "was neutral on Planet Nine's existence."[6] Li initially thought "OK, this kills Planet Nine" upon seeing 2017 OF201's orbit, but later conceded that the results were not definitive, jokingly stating that "it's 49 percent killed."

Implications for the Planet Nine hypothesis
Wikipedia page for 2017 OF201

[SunkenCiv]

We report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate, 2017 OF201, currently located at a distance of 90.5 au. Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with a semi-major axis of 838 au and a perihelion of 44.9 au precisely determined from 19 observations over seven years. Assuming a typical albedo of 0.15, we estimate a diameter about 700 km, making it the second-largest known object in this dynamical population and a likely dwarf planet. Its high eccentricity suggests that it is part of a broader, unseen population of similar objects totaling about 1 % of Earth's mass. Notably, the orbit of 2017 OF201 lies well outside the clustering of longitude of perihelion observed in extreme trans-Neptunian objects, which has been proposed as dynamical evidence for a distant, undetected planet.

Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201Sihao Cheng, Jiaxuan Li, Eritas Yang | Cornell University
Submitted on 21 May 2025

[SunkenCiv]

Astronomers Were Looking for Planet Nine
when this Guy Showed Up in the Telescope Image | 13:11 
Territory | 61.3K subscribers | 58,569 views | June 10, 2025

Astronomers have just identified what could be a new dwarf planet using observations from the Dark Energy Camera in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The discovery wasn't made through a single lucky image, but by carefully analyzing seven years of archival data, which revealed nineteen separate detections, enough to reconstruct its orbit.

And once they mapped it out, they found the object follows an extreme orbit. 2017 OF201 travels in a long elliptical path around the Sun. At its closest, it comes in at about 44.5 astronomical units, just a bit beyond Pluto. But at its farthest? It swings out past 1,600 AU. For scale, that's over 50 times farther than Neptune. One orbit takes about 25,000 years.

That's not just far. That's outer Oort Cloud territory!

[alexander_busek]

The Sun is just one focus. Where is the other?..........

The ellipse is always symmetrical. The other focus would be at the opposite side of the ellipse, at the same distance to the ellipse itself. Just draw a straight line through the entire ellipse, intersecting the perihelion and the Sun.

In the above image, the foci are at F and F'.

In the case of a perfectly circular orbit, the two foci collapse to a single point.

Regards,