New Object Found at Edge of Solar System

Rei writes to tell us NewScientist is reporting that a new object has been found beyond Pluto. The new object, nicknamed "Buffy", has an almost circular orbit which is tilted some 47 degrees off of most other bodies in our solar system. From the article: "Neptune has been blamed for scattering many other [Kuiper Belt Objects] into tilted paths. But these tend to show other signs of a past interaction with the giant planet, such as moving in elliptical paths and having one part of their orbit pass near Neptune's at 30 astronomical units from the Sun. [Buffy], however, follows a nearly circular path. And it is too distant to have come into direct contact with Neptune, traveling between 52 and 62 AU from the Sun. Its orbit is also too circular - and too small - to have been tilted by a passing star."

Comments

Shameful...

[MutantHamster]

"Neptune has been blamed for scattering many other [Kuiper Belt Objects] into tilted paths."

Tsk tsk. So typical of today's media. Always ready to play the blame-game.

Windex

[AviLazar]

It's not a new space object, it's a piece of lint on the telescope.

1,2,3...

[aprilsound]

Neptune has been blamed for scattering many other [Kuiper Belt Objects] into tilted paths...

...damn you neptune!!!

Oops, I mean, KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHNNNNN!!!!!!!!!

From TFA

[the computer guy nex]

"He ventures another possible explanation - that the Sun had a twin and that both stars followed circular orbits around each other"

2 problems with this.

1) Stars do not dissapear. They continue to have fusion on larger and larger elements until it hits a point it cannot generate enough heat to fuse the next one. None of our planets match the description of a dead star.

2) "Twin" stars are remarkably identical, and our sun has plenty of life left.

Re:From TFA

[phlegmofdiscontent]

A brown dwarf companion of the sun would probably have been discovered by now. The closest known brown dwarves are Epsilon Indi Ba and Epsilon Indi Bb, located 11.8 light years (3.63 parsecs) away. While they have very low visual luminosities (I haven't seen any published figures), they are relatively bright in the infrared (11.9 in the J band). Now, let's say a conjectured companion of the sun is 10,000 AU away. That's 0.05 parsecs, or 72.6 times closer than the Epsilon Indi brown dwarves. Since brightness is proportional to the square of the distance, that makes it 5271 times brighter or about 9.3 magnitudes brighter, giving a magnitude of 2.6 in the J band. There just aren't that many stars that bright in the infrared. It would have been noticed by now by the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey.
Similarly, nearby stars are usually discovered by proper motion surveys since nearby stars will appear to move faster against the background than far stars. Any companions of the sun would have been noticed. So there, in a nutshell, is a nail in the coffin of the Nemesis theory.

Re:From TFA

[AeroIllini]

If the orbits are correct then you can hide the companion from our view. Very unlikily but stranger things are seen in the galaxy.

No, you really can't. You see, everything in the universe that's made of matter has its own gravity, and this gravity tends to affect things in its vicinity. In fact, it could be said that everything in the universe affects everything else; luckily, most of these interactions are so tiny that they can be safely thrown out of the equations and the margin of error is on an order of magnitude so small that even an angel would have to pick up his robes and tread carefully to dance on it.

In a closer vicinity, such as the solar system, things affect each other with real-world measureable results. Distant suns wobble distinctly when they have planets orbiting them. The Earth's orbit is changed slightly by the presence of the other planets, and the planets' motions are changed slightly by the presence of ours, all in ways that people can predict, if they put enough variables in their equations (for the mathematically inclined: the orbit is no longer a single conic section at that point-- it becomes a very complex set of joined conic sections). If another sun, or even a planet, existed in our same orbit on the other side of the sun (actually in the L3 libration point, which is the only place it could orbit the sun and not allow us to see it, ever) we might not be able to directly observe it from Earth, but we would certainly be able to notice the effect it has on the other planets in the solar system. Jupiter would wobble just the wrong way, and Mars would not be quite where we thought it would be after factoring in the gravity of every known object in the solar system.

Come to think of it, perhaps the Mars Polar Lander was expecting the ground to be a few kilometers farther away than it really was...

But I digress. My point is that a mathematically closed two-body orbital system is a pipe dream. There is no such thing as a closed system in the universe when it comes to orbits, and we have become quite good at predicting the presence of objects just by watching how they affect the orbits of known objects.

Early image.

[sharkey]

Picture of "Buffy" taken by the Voyager probe.

52 Astronomical Units??

[teutonic_leech]

Wow! That's 52 times the distance between the sun and the earth (1 AE = 91 million miles) which places that object at a distance of 4.7Billion miles from the sun. Amazing to think that there actually exists any type of 'orbit' - makes me feel very very small...

Re:52 Astronomical Units??

[rob_squared]

Then I hate to break this to you, but the oort cloud, which is part of our solar system, is between 50,000 and 100,000 Astronomical Units away:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

Re:I vote that we send Joss Whedon there.

[Rei]

Great idea! Joss could take people out to colonize the rim. Meanwhile, here in the central planets, we could form an alliance so that everyone could enjoy the comfort and enlightenment of true civilization!

("River, honey, he's putting the hair away now...")

Re:Other names

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Seems to me that the habit of naming new celestial bodies after pop-culture icons haven't changed during the few thousands of years we've been at it.

It must be said:

[mjolnir_]

"That's no moon."

-mj

Re:Who gets to name these things?

[mph]

Not that there's anything wrong with Buffy, but seriously, who's got the "root-servers" of extraterrestrial object naming?

From TFA (I know, I must be new here):

Allen and her colleagues will continue to observe the new object to pin down its orbit more accurately. And following the convention for naming bodies in the Kuiper Belt, they have suggested several Inuit names for the object to the International Astronomical Union.

In other news...

[DaFallus]

The United States government has just green-lit a project to send a ship to the edge of the solar system to study this new object. I hear that the scientists and other passengers will be cryogenically frozen during the long trip and that the pilots will be assisted by Microsoft's latest breakthrough in artificial intelligence: Computer Lifeforce Intelligent Pilot Project: Year 9000 edition, or C.L.I.P.P.Y 9000 for short.

Re:In other news...

[dupup]

C.L.I.P.P.Y 9000

"It looks like you're trying to disconnect me after I refused to open the pod bay door. Would you like me to sing a song?"

Re:Small??

[Darius Jedburgh]

It stems from a confusion between 'small' as in size and 'small' as in insignificant. For some reason people seem to think that the fact that they are physically small compared to a galaxy, say, makes them insignificant, as if significance is a thing handed to you by the universe rather than being something humans find or make. I guess some people can't tell the difference between a literal and a metaphorical statement.

Re:Old news?

[phlegmofdiscontent]

Actually, they've discovered several hundred objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. They're called Kuiper Belt objects. The ones that get the press are big ones, oddly shaped ones, or in this case, ones with weird orbits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt