Scientists just discovered a mysterious new world far beyond Pluto-脚踏实地网

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Scientists just discovered a mysterious new world far beyond Pluto

时间：2025-06-15 10:58:59 来源：脚踏实地网

Just when you thought you knew all the worlds in the solar system,关键字2 astronomers go and discover a new object that could rewrite the spacemap.

This icy world, temporarily named 2017 OF201, could be a distant cousin of Pluto— and scientists mean "distant" quite literally. At its farthest point, it's more than 1,600 times the distance of Earth from the sun. At its closest, it's still 44.5 times farther than Earth.

What makes 2017 OF201 stand out is its very stretched-out path around the sun, which takes an incredible 25,000 Earth-years to complete. For comparison, Pluto makes a lap around the sun every 248 Earth-years.

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How this world got to the edge of the solar systemis a mystery — perhaps the result of close encounters with a giant planet like Jupiteror Neptune that tossed it out into a wide orbit. Or maybe when it was originally ejected, it ended up in the so-called Oort Cloudbefore returning. The Oort Cloud is thought to be a sphere of ancient, icy objects surrounding the solar system. NASAsays the cloud remains a theory because the comets there have been too faint and distant to be directly observed.

The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which catalogs new moons and other small bodies in the solar system, announced the discoveryon May 21. At roughly 435 miles wide, 2017 OF201 could qualify as a dwarf planet, the same designation Pluto has had since its demotion from ninth planet in 2006.

"Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe," said Sihao Cheng, the Institute for Advanced Study researcher who led the discovery, in a statement, "there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system."

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SEE ALSO: Jupiter designed the solar system. Here's what the planet was like as a child. An infographic of dwarf planets in the solar system

A composite image displays the five recognized dwarf planets in the solar system, as well as the new candidate 2017 OF201. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Sihao Cheng et al. infographic

Cheng, along with Princeton University graduate students, found the possible dwarf planet while searching for a potential "Planet 9," a hypothetical hidden world whose gravitational effects could be responsible for a strange clustering of far-flung objects beyond Neptune.

The team used computer programs to look through years of space pictures taken by the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. By connecting bright spots that moved slowly across the sky, they were able to identify it.

These are the current orbits of Pluto, Neptune, and 2017 OF201. Credit: Jiaxuan Li / Sihao Cheng infographic

But 2017 OF201 is a strange outlier because it doesn’t follow the clustering pattern of other trans-Neptunian objects.

"The existence of 2017 OF201 might suggest that Planet 9 or X doesn't exist," said Jiaxuan Li, one of the collaborators, on his personal website. Their researchis available now on the arXiv pre-print server.