Perhaps we may have discovered a new dwarf planet in the sun system: a team of astronomers has in fact recently identified a new one Trans-Nettunian object (i.e. that is located beyond the orbit of Neptune), called for now 2017 of201. To discover 2017 of201 were SIHAO CHENG, Jiaxuan there And Eritas Yang of the University of Princeton thanks to the analysis of data from two astronomical observers in Chile and Hawaii during 7 years of observations.
For now we talk about “Nano planet candidate”because its size and orbit have yet to be confirmed every reasonable doubt: if they were, however, this body would be large enough (about 700 km in diameter) to be classified as a Nano planetthat is, the same category of celestial bodies to which Pluto also belongs. Basically a dwarf planet is like a planet: orbit around the sun, with the difference that it is too little massive to have effectively “cleaned up” its orbit from other material.
It would also be one of the bodies of the most distant solar system that we can observe: its extremely elongated orbit would bring the body from a maximum of 838 Astronomical units (1 astronomical unit is the average land-sell distance, about 150 million km) up to a minimum 45 astronomical units to Perielio (a distance from the sun comparable with that of Pluto). The body would therefore take around our star in about 25,000 terrestrial years. At the moment it would be about 90 astronomical units from the sun; his last passage to Perdie, according to astronomers, would go back to 1930the year in which Pluto was discovered.
An interesting aspect of this discovery is that 2017 of201 He is not a candidate to be the hypothetical “planet nine” (or “Planet X”): even if the distance from the sun is comparable with that of the hypothetical planet nine (a few hundred astronomical units), the latter is expected that it is much larger and massive than 2017 of201 (we speak of approximately 5 times the mass of the earth) to explain the gravitational disturbances observed in the trans-energy objects observed so far.
