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A planetoid called Farfarout is now officially the most distant object in our solar system, reports Passant Rabie for Inverse .
Researchers determine distance in space using astronomical units, or the average distance between the Earth and the sun—roughly 92 million miles. Farfarout is 132 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, which is four times farther away from the sun than Pluto. That staggering distance from the sun means it takes Farfarout around 1,000 years to complete a single lap around the sun, according to a statement .
In case you are keeping track:
Farfarout is farthest object in our solar system yet known | Space | EarthSky
Astronomers have confirmed that an object with the nickname of Farfarout is, to date, the farthest object we've seen in the solar system.
Artist’s concept of the object nicknamed Farfarout (lower right) in the outer reaches of our solar system. Estimated to be about 250 miles (400 km) across, it’s 132 times farther from the sun than Earth. In this illustration, the sun appears in the upper left. The Milky Way stretches diagonally across the background. Image via NOIRLab / NSF/ AURA/ J. da Silva.
Wild Days of the Early Solar System: Ceramic Chips Inside Meteorites Provide Snapshot of 4.5
This artist’s concept illustrates a solar system that is a much younger version of our own. New evidence from meteorites suggests the sun’s early days were not as quiet as previously thought. Credit: Illustration courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
A new analysis of ceramic chips embedded in meteorites suggests the formation of our solar system was not as quiet and orderly as we once thought.
A new study from University of Chicago scientists builds evidence that the baby solar system likely witnessed wild temperature swings and changing conditions—contradicting the decades-old theory that the solar system had gradually and steadily cooled following the formation of the Sun.
What Are NASA's Lucky Peanuts? – NASA Solar System Exploration
Good-luck peanuts made their first appearance at the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's in 1964 during the Ranger 7 mission. JPL had six failures prior to this effort, so the pressure was on to succeed.
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"I thought passing out peanuts might take some of the edge off the anxiety in the mission operations room," said Dick Wallace, mission trajectory engineer on the Ranger team. "The rest is history."
Quite a lot has been going on:
This Planetoid Is Officially the Farthest Known Object in Our Solar System | Freethink
Object Dubbed 'FarFarOut' Now Farthest in the Solar System - Nerdist
Smithsonian Magazine reported on the confirmation, which a team at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab recently announced. Since Farfarout’s discovery in 2018, made using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, the team’s been tracking the object’s trajectory to determine its orbit.
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In 2018 “we did not know the object’s orbit… [because] it takes years of observations to get an object’s orbit around the Sun,” Scott Sheppard explained in a NOIRLab press release . Sheppard, Farfarout’s co-discoverer, added that despite the lack of data, the team could still easily identify the object as “very distant.”
A Comet Reaches of the Solar System Wiped Out the Dinosaurs
Their analysis suggests that it was a comet originating from a region of icy debris at the edge of the solar system , that Jupiter was responsible for its crashing on Earth, and that similar impacts can be expected every 250 to 750 million years.
"Jupiter is very important because it is the most massive planet in our solar system," Amir Siraj, one of the study's authors, said. "Jupiter ended up being a kind of "pinball machine" that "propels those long-period comets into orbits that bring them closer to the Sun," he explained.
Happening on Twitter
A planetoid called Farfarout is now officially the most distant object in our solar system. https://t.co/Ptx24r1mt6 SmithsonianMag (from Washington, D.C.) Thu Feb 18 04:15:03 +0000 2021
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