Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system (opens in new tab)

Thanks, it helps quite a bit to be able to visualize what they're talking about.

Out at 90 AU, and by the year 3000 is out at 500 AU, and that's still not anywhere near maximum distance. Looked like it was going to be 10,000+ years orbits or longer, and probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.

Little skeptical it would even orbit normally with how heavily eccentric it is, and the extreme distance at maximum. Way... out beyond the heliopause / heliosheath / termination shock.

Does anyone know if this has its PE in alignment with the other Sedna type objects found?

I think there is a tendency for them to have their PE out to one side and the AP out to the other giving a fairly obvious pattern indicating another larger object is shepherding the others into their orbits.

Dwarf planet versus comet/asteroid hinges on mass, basically its "enough mass to be roughly round" (technically it's called "hydrostatic equilibrium").

Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most people considered Ceres, Vesta, and things like that to be planets- they were bodies that wandered around the solar system, that meant they were planets. When the numbers started to get into the 20's, everyone decided to create a new category, "asteroid" (Greek for 'star-like') and put all of the smaller things in that. So when Pluto was discovered in 1930 it was slotted right into the planet category. Pluto was discovered mostly by accident, because Clyde Tombaugh was amazing at working the blink comparator, and finding the one dot that moved in between the two pictures of the night sky a few days apart.

However, by the 1990's and 2000's you had computers and digital cameras, which are even better than Clyde at finding things that move, and quickly the number of planets started to go up- and it was clear that once we had thoroughly mapped the ~~Oort Cloud~~ (meant Kuiper Belt, see below) etc. we would have dozens of planets. And so once again astronomers decided to create a new category, just like they had with asteroids a century earlier. This time they drew the line in such a way that Ceres got moved from asteroid to dwarf planet- it has enough mass to be roughly round, so after over a century of being an asteroid it became a dwarf planet.

This is how things always work in science: we discover something, then we discover more of them, and re-categorize everything based on the new discoveries. It's just more noticeable with Pluto because reciting the planets is done by every schoolkid in a way that they don't for subatomic particles or for species of voles or whatever.

That wiki page needs some work. The section you linked to describes the eccentricity as a ratio, however the top of the page describes 0 as perfectly circular and 1 as an escape trajectory.

If it were a ratio then 0 would be escape and 1 would be circular.

Depends on the albedo, if the H magnitude is a good measurement, then it is probably between 300-700km. These are rough bounds, its highly dependent on how reflective it's surface is (albedo).

With an orbit somewhere around 28k years, it reached perihelion in about 1931, at 45 au from the Sun.

This thread is making me realize that The Expanse has me pronouncing planetoids in Belter.

Going off the SMA and eccentricity, part of its orbit is "relatively" close to the sun, ~ 45 AU, about 1.5x the distance to Neptune (~ 30 AU), and the other half of its orbit is very, very far away, ~ 1700 AU, over 50 times the distance to Neptune, but still less than 1% of the distance to the next star.

When it's in the faraway part of its orbit, it is moving very slowly, probably only tens of meters per second, but it's still close enough to the sun to eventually fall back in for another loop.

However, if something else dense enough got close enough out there, it would be easily perturbed and have its whole orbit altered, or even be ejected.

But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.

If my goal was to fall into the earth and kept missing I would be depressed too. Each try it misses by slightly more and it's orbital distance increases. How sad is that?

Also, I like to anthropomorphize inanimate objects because secretly they hate it.

Earth is also constantly failing at falling into the Moon.

Why did we have to evolve in such a loser system??

its getting further away, if it helps your understanding of the situation better

“falling into” was never part of the equation

No. It’s smaller than other moons in our solar system. It’s never going to be a planet again, but a planetoid, dwarf planet, or even asteroid is appropriate.

> Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern server

They could probably get more performance out of one core on a modern phone, never mind a single modern server. But you see some really old systems in a lot of equipment, not because the porting costs are expensive, but the certification of proving the new system works the same is more than the operational cost of the legacy equipment.

Sure, but the capital and one-time cost of acquiring and shifting to the modern server would be non-zero, and it would entail some risk. (While OpenVMS is maintained and runs on newer systems, that doesn't mean the software that matters on the existing cluster would run without modification.)

It probably would save operating costs, and probably over a reasonably short window, if it was done successfully, though.

> Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern server?

Maybe the software they use won’t easily run on a modern server.

You could ask them, but you might have to hook up your modem and try to call them. Maybe they have a BBS you could leave your question on.

One of the other theories for Planet X I believe has been debunked as absense of evidence. There are gaps in the documented bodies orbiting the sun that could imply an object clearing orbits, but they were dismissed instead as sampling errors - there are parts of the sky that are easier to catalog than others, and so of course we have cataloged the easy parts more thoroughly. We need observation stations in a sun orbit to see the parts we can’t see easily from an earth orbit.

And I just put the kettle on for the Anunnaki, what a pity.

Humans probably can orbit the sun 2000+ times in a not significantly distant future

Specifically: when this object is at its closest and Pluto is at its farthest then this object can be the one closer to Earth. Pluto comes the closest of the two overall though.