What astronomers thought was the most distant object in the solar system, “Farout”, lost its title after just two years. That crown now goes to “Farfarout” (zero points for creativity, you guys), a planetoid more than 130 times further from the sun than Earth.
As noted by Inverse, after years of observations, astronomers have confirmed that the asteroid designated by the Minor Planet Center as 2018 AG37, nicknamed Farfarout, is the furthest known object in the solar system at 132 astronomical units from the sun.
A single AU is the average distance from the Earth to the sun, which is about 92 million miles or 148 million kilometers. (For reference, the previous title holder Farout, officially designated as VG18 2018, is ‘just’ 120 AU awayThat means that Farfarout is about 12.3 billion miles or 19.7 billion kilometers away, or in context about four times as far from the sun as Pluto. At that distance, the asteroid completes a single orbit around the sun only once in a millennium.
“Because of this long orbital period, it moves very slowly through the sky, requiring several years of observations to precisely determine its trajectory,” said David Tholen, an astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and team member. behind the discovery. , said in a statement this week
The team – Tholen, Scott Sheppard of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University – discovered the asteroid in 2018 with the Subaru 8-meter telescope on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In the years since, they have used the Gemini North telescope, which is also located on Mauna Kea, and the Magellan telescope in Chile to determine Farfarout’s orbit and confirm its status as the most distant known object in our solar system.
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“Farfarout’s discovery shows our increasing ability to map the outer solar system and observe further and further towards the edges of our solar system,” Sheppard said in this week’s statement. “Only with the advancements in recent years from large digital cameras to very large telescopes has it become possible to efficiently discover very distant objects such as Farfarout.”
There’s still a lot scientists don’t know about this incredibly distant asteroid, but they’ve uncovered a few clues in their research. The team believes it is at the “bottom” of the dwarf planet “assuming it is an ice-rich object” and has an estimated diameter of about 248 miles (400 km). It has an incredibly elongated orbit that crosses paths with Neptune, leading scientists to speculate that Farfarout was once a much closer planetary neighbor, but may have strayed too close to Neptune and due to the gravitational pull of the much larger celestial body.
Astronomers believe that studying Farfarout can provide insight into how Neptune formed and evolved in our solar system, and the two are likely to interact again because of their intersecting orbits.
It is uncertain how long Farfarout will keep its title, especially given the rapid advancement of our terrestrial telescopes. Sheppard called the asteroid “just the tip of the iceberg of solar system objects in the very distant solar system.” Who knows, maybe we’ll have a Farfar around this time next yearFARout of our hands.