"A team of astronomers has discovered the most-distant body ever observed in our Solar System. It is the first known Solar System object that has been detected at a distance that is more than 100 times farther than Earth is from the Sun."
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2428
“Farout” is at about 120 astronomical units, its brightness suggests that it is about 500 km in diameter (likely making it spherical) and it has a pinkish hue, a color generally associated with ice-rich objects.
Very nice discovery.
Regards
Marc.
Interesting - a similar albedo to Pluto (with the estimated 500km diameter) would place this at about 23.1 magnitude in brightness.
He is a link to the Minor Planet Center's Electronic Circular for this object, posted today:
https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K18/K18Y14.html
Note that the Delta (distance from Earth in AU) and the r (distance from sun in AU) are run together.
For November 17th those values were 124.3330 and 125.2666 respectively.
Also there is this which is a little more readable:
https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=2018+VG18&commit=Show
In the orbital elements section the q (perihelion) is currently listed as 21.739 AU so it was closer at some point decades ago. But all those orbital elements are still pretty uncertain. It's currently on the way out on its orbit.
for those Celestia users here is a SPICE orbit add on for "2018 VG18"
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=953
this assumes that spice orbits are set up and working , for that see:
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewforum.php?f=18
And after FarOut... FarFarOut:
https://www.space.com/farfarout-most-distant-solar-system-body.html
"Astronomers just found an object that lies 140 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. That's 140 times the Earth-sun distance, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers)."
Regards,
Marc.
Am I the only one hoping that Voyager 2 is coincidentally going to fly by this?
While hoping for a coincidence of that magnitude, perhaps we should also worry about the possibility of a collision?
Code could be written to process those images. Most of the image processing code that's used today is https://github.com/nasa/VICAR
What's not working are the cameras and scan platforms on the spacecraft. They were turned off decades ago to save power to avoid browning out the spacecraft.
turning back on the cameras, scan platform and the other remote sensing instruments unfortunately would require more power than the poor old RTG would be capable of providing
Not gonna happen; there's nowhere near enough power capacity left, as Paolo said. Voyager is now exclusively a particles & fields mission for however much longer they last.
Moving on...
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