Goblin planet discovered far from the sun

Berniewood Hogan

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:wtf: Introducing ‘The Goblin’: A new, distant dwarf planet bolsters eviden

Far beyond the orbits of the solar system’s eight planets, astronomers have found another object they’ve nicknamed “The Goblin.” It’s a small world traveling a lonely path through the outer reaches of our cosmic neighborhood, and it joins a small club of dwarf planets and other planet-like objects out beyond Neptune. Most excitingly, the object’s movements fit into previous theories regarding a possible “Planet X” hiding far away in our solar system, and could help astronomers to find it.

Distant Objects

The dwarf planet’s official name is 2015 TG387, and it was discovered three years ago by a team of researchers using the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, the astronomers were scanning broad swathes of the sky in search of faint glimmers that might betray new objects in the solar system. Sheppard, who found another similar object just four years ago, spent the next three years confirming the original sighting with his team and announced the findtoday in the Astronomical Journal.

The dwarf planet is about 190 miles in diameter based on preliminary measurements. Pluto, for example, is about 1,500 miles in diameter. The Goblin is one of just a few objects whose elliptical orbits never take them closer to the sun than Neptune. Just two, 2012 VP113 and 90377 Sedna have a perihelion (the point of an object’s orbit closest to the sun) farther out than The Goblin, and its orbit actually takes it far beyond them at its most distant point. The dwarf planet is estimated to reach some 2,300 Astronomical Units (AU) from the sun at maximum, putting it more than twice as far out as Sedna. Earth is one AU from the sun, so the new object, at maximum, is 2,300 times further from the sun than we are.

2015 TG378’s nickname comes from the letters TG in its official name, as well as a recognition of the fact that it was found around Halloween, the authors say.


The orbits of the new extreme dwarf planet 2015 TG387 and its fellow Inner Oort Cloud objects 2012 VP113 and Sedna as compared with the rest of the Solar System. 2015 TG387 was nicknamed ‘The Goblin’ by the discoverers, as its provisional designation contains TG and the object was first seen near Halloween. 2015 TG387 has a larger semi-major axis than either 2012 VP113 or Sedna, which means it travels much further from the Sun at its most distant point in its orbit, which is around 2300 AU.
Illustration by Roberto Molar Candanosa and Scott Sheppard, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science
The vast distances the object must travel to complete an orbit means that it only travels around the Sun once every 40,000 years. We were lucky we caught The Goblin when we did, says Sheppard, because it’s only visible to use with current technology less than one percent of the time.

And the find reinforces the idea that there are likely many more objects like it in our solar system orbiting out of sight.

“For over 99 percent of TG387’s orbit, it would be too faint for us to detect it,” Sheppard says. “This suggests we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of these kinds of objects and that there are thousands of them that are too far away for us to see.”

Planetary Dance

As of right now, we only know of a handful of these so-called “Trans-Neptunian Objects,” those that live out beyond Neptune’s orbit. None so far have been designated planets, but at least two, Eris and Pluto, are quite large, with diameters of well over 1,000 miles. Most follow eccentric orbits that loop relatively near to the sun before taking them to the edge of the Kuiper Belt some 50 AU out and beyond. This makes them hard to find, but modern telescopes have begun to pick them out against the blackness of space.

The few that we do know of behave in a curious way, though. Though most orbit too far from the giant planets like Jupiter and Neptune to be influenced by their gravity, most distant objects seem to be moving in accordance with some powerful gravitational force in the outer solar system. This planetary harmony was first picked up on by Sheppard and collaborator Chad Trujillo in 2012, when they discovered 2012 VP113, but subsequent discoveries have only bolstered their theory.

In essence, their orbits are arranged in such a way that it seems like there’s another large planet tugging them into alignment. Called either “Planet X” or “Planet Nine,” this still-hypothetical world could remain undiscovered in much the same way The Goblin did.

Chasing More Goblins

Sheppard says that The Goblin’s orbit fits exactly into their models of how distant objects should behave if Planet X exists, further bolstering the notion that another massive world may be hiding in our solar system.

“When we put a hypothetical distant massive Planet X into our numerical simulations of the solar system, TG387 is still stable,” he says. “This is not true if you just randomly placed small objects into the outer solar system, as they would mostly be unstable to a massive Planet X.”

Sheppard hopes to find more objects like The Goblin to further pin down the location and orbit of the potential Planet Nine. The outer solar system is still a largely unknown place, and astronomers will likely be discovering new objects there for years to come.

“There are a lot of exotic and extreme objects yet to be found in the outer solar system,” he says. “We are only just now uncovering what the very outer solar system might look like and what might be out there.”
Including, perhaps, a true ninth planet.
 

Soymuscle Mike

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Any day now:

giphy.gif
 

Wargames

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Oh shyt they are saying Planet X exist! We are living in Spooky times Breh's....... spooky fukking times
 

Leasy

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Read this yesterday. I think they already know Planet X exist but not saying anything until they can determine the analysis. I won’t be surprised if this solar system had another planetary system on the outskirts. This Sun star like planet may be a brown dwarf which is strong but less powerful than our Sun but can maintain life on inner planets. This second sun gravitational pull affects Neptune etc...

This may explain where UFOs are coming from because from a technological standpoint if you are advance Earth isn’t that far.
 

Rice N Beans

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:wtf: This is the same orbit of a planet from all those 2012 End Of The Earth YouTube videos.

EDIT: Doesn't look like it crosses into the orbit of Earth, but, damn the discovery itself makes the scenario plausible.

It's scary in a way.
 
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Oh shyt they are saying Planet X exist! We are living in Spooky times Breh's....... spooky fukking times
Read this yesterday. I think they already know Planet X exist but not saying anything until they can determine the analysis. I won’t be surprised if this solar system had another planetary system on the outskirts. This Sun star like planet may be a brown dwarf which is strong but less powerful than our Sun but can maintain life on inner planets. This second sun gravitational pull affects Neptune etc...

This may explain where UFOs are coming from because from a technological standpoint if you are advance Earth isn’t that far.
:wtf: This is the same orbit of a planet from all those 2012 End Of The Earth YouTube videos.

EDIT: Doesn't look like it crosses into the orbit of Earth, but, damn the discovery itself makes the scenario plausible.

It's scary in a way.

Not the Planet X (Niburu) of conspiracy theorists. Planet X is a designation astronomers use for the planetary body beyond Neptune they hope to find called Planet 9.

Planet 9's (the real Planet X) orbit is from 2 to 7 times farther away from the Sun than the orbit of non-existent Planet X (Niburu) of the conspiracy theorists.
 

A.R.$

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Very interesting. I’m still mad about them stripping the planet tittle from Pluto:martin:
I wonder if Goblin is too small to have a moon.
 

acri1

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Very interesting. I’m still mad about them stripping the planet tittle from Pluto:martin:
I wonder if Goblin is too small to have a moon.

It is.

The Goblin planet is less than 200 miles in diameter, there's no way that's big enough to hold a moon. By comparison Pluto is 7 or 8 times bigger.
 

Leasy

Let's add some Alizarin Crimson & Van Dyke Brown
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Philly (BYRD GANG)
Not the Planet X (Niburu) of conspiracy theorists. Planet X is a designation astronomers use for the planetary body beyond Neptune they hope to find called Planet 9.

Planet 9's (the real Planet X) orbit is from 2 to 7 times farther away from the Sun than the orbit of non-existent Planet X (Niburu) of the conspiracy theorists.

That is understandable but the gravitational pull from Planet X is affecting the rotation of Pluto Neptune and Uranus. Whatever is out there is massive or has strong gravitational pull.

I think our Sun may actually be a part of a two star system where the other star is affecting outer bodies and is probably a dwarf similar to Jupiter.

So in simple terms Planet X may be a Planet that is tide to a smaller brown star within our own solar system :ohhh:
 
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