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Illustration shows a trance object dancing in harmony with Neptune. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)
Astronomers have found that a strange space rock at the end of the solar system is locked in a rhythmic dance with Neptune.
The site, marked in 2020, is part of a family of distant objects of the solar system called trans-Neptune objects (TNOS). 2020 VN40 is the first object to be found orbiting the sun once every ten orbits that Neptune makes. Given that a Neptunan year lasts 164.8 earthly years, this means that 2020 VN40 has one devil of a long year, lasted around 1648 years or 19 776 months on Earth!
The team behind this study believes that the VN40 orbital dance orbital dance in 2020. In this way, this discovery could help researchers understand better the dynamics of bodies at the end of the solar system.
“This is a big step in understanding the external solar system,” the leader of the Rosemary Pike team of the Astrophysics Center | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. “This shows that even the very remote regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects and give us new clues about how the solar system develops.”
The orbital rhythm of 2020 VN40 was found in data from the study of remote objects on the large slope (Lido). Lido uses the Canada-France-Hawre telescope with a backup from the twin observatory and Walter Baade’s telescope to look for the external solar system for strange objects.
In particular, Lido specializes in TNOS hunting with orbits that take them far above and below the orbital plane around the Sun. These are regions of the solar system that have so far been rarely studied by astronomers.
“It was fascinating to learn how small bodies in the solar system exist on these very large, very sloping orbits,” said the member of the Lido team and Regina University researcher Samantha Lowler.
The 2020 orbit of the VN40 as a thick yellow line tilted up and to the left of the orbits of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, represented by the white circles. | Credit: Rosemary Pike, CFA
The highly sloping road of 2020 VN40 finds it average from the sun, equivalent to 140 times larger than the distance between Earth and our star.
However, the most interesting element of the orbit of 2020 VN40 is its resonance with the orbit of Neptune. Other bodies are rhythmically aligned with Neptune, make their closest approaches to the sun, their perihelion, when Neptune is at the greatest distance of our star or his Afelion.
Determining this trend, 2020 VN40 is in Perihelion, when Neptune is also close to the sun. That is, if one looked at it from above the solar system, with the inclination of 2020 VN40, which means that this TNO and Neptune are not really close to each other; Tno is actually far under the solar system.
It also separates 2020 VN40 from other resonance TNOS, which tends to remain in the plane of the solar system when they make close approaches to the sun.
“This new movement is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we know,” said the team member and a scientist at California University of California Santa Cruz Ruth Murray-Kli. “This may change the way we think about the way remote objects move.”
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The discovery of the orbital strangeness of 2020 VN40 suggests that the objects of the solar system with highly sloping orbits can perceive new and unexpected types of movement.
The hunting is now for more bodies like 2020 VN40, with the newly -enclosed Observatory Vera S. Rubin will play a key role in this investigation.
“This is just the beginning,” said the team member and researcher of the Institute of Planetary Sciences Catherine Wolk. “We open a new window in the past of the solar system.”
The results of 2020 VN40 were published on July 7 at The Planetary Science Journal.