At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland, the discovery of a celestial body called for now just V774104 was announced. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, a team led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii discovered what seems the most distant object yet detected in the solar system being about 15.5 billion kilometers (about 9.5 billion miles) from the Sun, about three times Pluto and about 103 times that of Earth.

Right now the information about V774104 are really limited. Dwarf planets and other celestial bodies beyond Pluto have been discovered in recent years but this is relatively small. In fact, its brightness suggests that it has a diameter between 500 and 1,000 kilometers (between 300 to 600 miles). It’s an interesting object for its great distance from the Sun, which puts it beyond the borders of the Kuiper belt, within what is called the Oort cloud.

We’re really talking about the frontier because that’s the outermost area of ​​the solar system, still virtually unknown. They’ll need to determine what type of orbit V774104 has to understand its nature. If it got significantly closer to the Sun, it’s likely a Kuiper belt object with a strange orbit caused by the interaction with other planets. If it always maintained its orbit far from the Sun, it would be an object of the inner Oort cloud.

Two dwarf planets remain very far from the Sun, Sedna and 2012 VP113. The orbits of celestial bodies in the inner Oort cloud are interesting for their eccentricity. It’s possible that there’s another big planet that influences the orbits of smaller objects but it’s also possible that those orbits are the result of the influence on the newborn solar system from the Sun’s “sibling” stars, at the time much closer.

Many other observations of V774104 are needed to understand its characteristics and it’s estimated that it will take a year just to get an idea of ​​its orbit. The huge distance makes it a subject of great interest for the research of many observatories but also very difficult to observe. With current technology, sending a space probe for a flyby is almost impossible but in the next few years in some way astronomers will gather some information about V774104.

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