Taiwanese astronomers have discovered “a missing piece of the puzzle” in the search for a ninth planet at the edge of the solar system.
A team led by Wang Shiang-yu (王祥宇) and Chen Ying-tung (陳英同) of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica found that “Ammonite” — a newly discovered “Sedna-like object,” a trans-Neptunian object on an orbit similar to that of the dwarf planet Sedna — orbited in the opposite direction from its three neighbors.
For years, astronomers had hypothesized that Sedna-like objects’ shared orbits were caused by gravitational influence from a speculated “planet nine” far beyond Neptune.
Photo courtesy of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica
However, Ammonite’s orbital divergence points to any potential planet being twice as far away as earlier estimates, Wang said.
This suggests that the outer solar system might be far more diverse and dynamic than previously thought, he said.
The team discovered Ammonite using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii in 2023, he added.
They spent a year observing and analyzing its orbit, he said.
Chen described the team’s work as “like discovering a missing piece of the puzzle at the solar system’s frontier.”
The discovery is part of the international research initiative Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy, involving scientists from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada and China.
The full research paper, “Discovery and Dynamics of a Sedna-like Object with a Perihelion of 66 au,” was published in Nature Astronomy on July 14.
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