A group of American astronomers discovered what appears to be the most distant object ever detected in the solar system, located three times farther from the Sun than Pluto and named by scientists as V774104.
This is a dwarf planet 500-1000 kilometers in diameter and whose orbit can not be proven until a year from now, according to informed the discoverers at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society held outside Washington .
“We can not explain the orbits of these objects according to what we know about the solar system,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and who led the team that made the discovery.
V774104 is 15.4 billion kilometers from the Sun, or 103 astronomical units (AU) away, or 103 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
The most distant object in the solar system to find this novelty was the dwarf planet Eris, which was located in 2005, has a moon named Dysnomia and is about 14.5 billion kilometers from the sun.
Joseph Burns, professor of astronomy at Cornell University in New York, said on Wednesday that the discovery is further shows that the solar system is larger than previously thought.
“We need a little more time to calculate the orbit and determine the exact size of the object,” he said.
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