Newfound Dwarf Planet 'The Goblin' May Lead to Mysterious Planet Nine

Space.com ^ | October 2, 2018 10:01am ET | Mike Wall,

[BenLurkin]

2015 TG387, a newfound object in the far outer solar system, way beyond Pluto. The orbit of 2015 TG387 shares peculiarities with those of other extremely far-flung bodies, which appear to have been shaped by the gravity of a very large object in that distant, frigid realm — the hypothesized Planet Nine, also known as Planet X.

"These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X,"

And 2015 TG387 is special among these bread crumbs, because it was found during a relatively uniform survey of the northern and southern skies rather than a targeted hunt for clustered objects in certain parts of the sky, Sheppard said. Targeted hunts can produce biased results — for example, the appearance of clustering where none may actually exist, he explained.

2015 TG387 has two dwarf-planet companions in the low-bias class, Sheppard said: 2012 VP113, which he and his colleague Chadwick Trujillo (who's a co-author of the new paper as well) spotted in 2014 as part of the same, ongoing long-term survey; and the relatively bright Sedna (because the whole sky has been searched to its level of brightness).

Sheppard and his colleagues first spotted 2015 TG387 in October 2015, using Japan's 26-foot (8 meters) Subaru telescope atop the volcanic peak Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The researchers nicknamed the object "The Goblin," because of the discovery date and the "TG" in the provisional designation.

It took the team three additional years to nail down The Goblin's orbit, which they did with the aid of observations by the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the Discovery Channel Telescope in Arizona.

2015 TG387 loops around the sun on an extremely elliptical path, coming within about 65 astronomical units of the sun at its closest point and getting about 2,300 AU away at its most distant.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks fieldmarshaldj.

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[Redcitizen]

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