Oort Cloud – Cosmic Log

Planet search turns up a dwarf called ‘The Goblin’

The International Space Station leaves a streak above the Subaru Telescope in a long-exposure image. Observations using the Subaru Telescope led to the discovery of the mini-world known as The Goblin. (Subaru Telescope / NAOJ Photo / Hideaki Fujiwara)

While searching for a hypothetical Planet Nine, astronomers found a distant mini-world that’s been given a spooky nickname: “The Goblin.”

The icy object was found at a distance of about 80 astronomical units from the sun, which translates to 7.4 billion miles. (One astronomical unit, or AU, equals 93 million miles, which is the distance between Earth and the sun.) That’s more than twice as far away as dwarf planet Pluto.

A research team led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Science first spotted The Goblin just before Halloween in 2015. That timing, plus the fact that it was given the numerical designation 2015 TG387, gave rise to the trick-or-treat nickname. (T.G. … Get it?)

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Solar system’s most distant world detected

Image: Kuiper Belt object — An artist’s conception shows an object in the distant Kuiper Belt. The newly reported object is beyond the Kuiper Belt, in a region known as the inner Oort Cloud. (Credit: G. Bacon / STScI / NASA)

Astronomers say they’ve identified the most distant celestial object in our solar system – a speck of light more than three times farther out than Pluto, called V774104.

The object is smaller than Pluto or Eris, which rank as the largest known worlds beyond Neptune with diameters of a little less than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers). V774104’s brightness suggests that it’s just 300 to 600 miles (500 to 1,000 kilometers) wide. But based on a limited number of observations by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers estimate its distance at more than 9.5 billion miles, or 103 times the distance between the sun and Earth.

The sun-Earth distance, known as an astronomical unit or AU, provides the best measuring stick for distant objects in the solar system. Pluto is currently 33 AU from the sun, and Eris’ distance is 96 AU. V774104 is farther out, in a twilight zone that’s between the belt of icy material called the Kuiper Belt and a halo of comets called the Oort Cloud.

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