What astronomers believe is the farthest object in the solar system, ‘Farout’, has lost its title after just two years. That crown now goes to “Farfarout” (zero points for creativity, you guys), a planetoid that is more than 130 times farther from the sun than the earth is.
As spotted by Reverse, after years of observations, astronomers have confirmed that the asteroid designated by the Minor Planet Center as 2018 AG37, nicknamed Farfarout, is the farthest known solar system object at 132 astronomical units from the sun.
A single AU is the average distance from the earth to the sun, or about 148 million kilometers. (For reference, the previous title holder Farout, officially named VG18 2018, is “only” 120 AU away.) This means that Farfarout is about 19.3 billion kilometers away, or for context, about four times farther from the sun than 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 across the sky, requiring several years of observations to accurately determine the trajectory,” said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy and a member of said the team behind the discovery. , said in a statement this week.
The team – Tholen, Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chad Trujillo, Northern Arizona University – originally spotted the asteroid in 2018 with the Subaru 8 meter telescope on top of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In the years that followed, they used the Gemini North Telescope, also on Mauna Kea, and the Magellan Telescope in Chile to determine the orbit of Farfarout and confirm its status as the most distant known object in our solar system.
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“The discovery of Farfarout shows our increasing ability to map the outer solar system and observe it further and further to the edge of our solar system,” Sheppard said in this week’s statement. “Only with the progress in the last few years of large digital cameras on very large telescopes has it been possible to detect objects such as Farfarout effectively.”
There is still much that scientists do not know about this incredibly distant asteroid, but they have discovered some clues in their research. The team believes it is at the ‘low point’ of the dwarf planet’s scale ‘assuming it is an icy object’ and has an estimated diameter of about 400 km. It has an incredibly elongated orbit that crosses paths with Neptune, leading scientists to speculate that Farfarout may have been a much closer planetary neighbor, but may have strayed too close to Neptune and been transferred to the outer corners of our solar system due to the many greater celestial body’s gravity.
Astronomers believe that studying Farfarout could provide insight into how Neptune formed and evolved in our solar system, and the two are likely to interact again due to their intersections.
It is uncertain how long Farfarout will retain its title, especially given the rapid progress of our terrestrial telescopes. Sheppard calls the asteroid ‘just the tip of the iceberg of objects in the solar system in the very distant solar system’. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll have a FarfarFARout on our hands.