Space, I think we can all agree, is pretty big. There’s a lot of stuff in it, most of it very far apart from each other. A walk from your place down to the shops might feel like a long distance, but it pales in comparison to the distance between, for instance, our beautiful Earth and the Sun. But even that is just a tiny baby space distance, compared to how far out from the Sun the dwarf planet informally known as Farout is.
[jwplayer KlaiocWU]
Discovered by the big-time eggheads at the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, Farout (formally known as 2018 VG18) is believed to be the most distant body in our solar system, orbiting the sun at a distance approximately 120 times further out than the Earth.
Farout is around 120 astronomical units away from the sun, which is roughly 17,950,000,000km, so even if you were driving at 110km/h, it would still take you nearly 19,000 years to get there (including breaks). By comparison, the dwarf planet Eris, which previously held the title, is only a piffling 96 AU away from the sun. For even more comparison, the much-maligned dwarf planet Pluto (RIP its real planet status) is only 34 AU away from the sun. Sad!
Farout was discovered as part of the team’s search for the mysterious Planet X, suspected to exist in an orbit somewhere out beyond Neptune. Instead, they found Farout.
Researcher Scott S Sheppard says that it has been difficult determining its exact orbit, due to its crushingly slow nature:
2018 VG18 is much more distant and slower moving than any other observed Solar System object, so it will take a few years to fully determine its orbit. But it was found in a similar location on the sky to the other known extreme Solar System objects, suggesting it might have the same type of orbit that most of them do. The orbital similarities shown by many of the known small, distant Solar System bodies was the catalyst for our original assertion that there is a distant, massive planet at several hundred AU shepherding these smaller objects.
It’s estimated that it takes over a thousand years for Farout to complete a single orbit, which is pretty slow.
Space! What a trip.
