"surprise discovery" in the outer Solar System Options

[Paolo]

from the buzz over twitter, I think I will monitor asteroid Chariklo today

[Paolo]

The news has been deleted (temporarily?) from Wikipedia due to the embargo.

you can ask wikipedia to show the modification history and it's still there...

[centsworth_II]

So, no chance a wily research group added then deleted a red herring post to wiki?

Still, the polite thing would be to act surprised.

[remcook]

These people do stellar occultations, so I'm thinking..TNO with atmosphere?
edit - ah I'm apparently not up to date with the rumours

[machi]

It looks that we can expect two big discoveries from the outer solar system!
One is from the ESO and one from the Carnegie Institution.

[nprev]

<taps foot impatiently>…<waits for OFFICIAL press releases>…<will zap any rumors or unofficial releases>...

[elakdawalla]

Well, the embargo has officially broken on one of the discoveries: A second Sedna! Here's the MPEC.

This is a big deal for people who care about the formation and evolution of the solar system.

I am really terrible at understanding and visualizing orbits. I would love to have a diagram showing the orbits of Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Sedna, and 2012 VP113. I am going to go try to make it myself, but if someone beats me to it, well, I wouldn't be sad

[Explorer1]

Here's an article about this second one:
http://www.astrobio.net/components/com_new...ail.php?id=6082

New work from Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory reports the discovery of a distant dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, which was found beyond the known edge of the solar system. This is likely one of thousands of distant objects that are thought to form the so-called inner Oort cloud. What’s more, their work indicates the potential presence of an enormous planet, perhaps up to 10 times the size of Earth, not yet seen, but possibly influencing the orbit of 2012 VP113, as well as other inner Oort cloud objects.

Yikes!
That would make this other embargoed discovery tame by comparison!

[Phil Stooke]

Nooooooo! Surely a planet that big would have been found already in IR, and its gravity would have been obvious for decades. There can't be anything that big out there.

Phil

[JRehling]

The news is online, if you want to search around. It is rather surprising.

[elakdawalla]

Nooooooo! Surely a planet that big would have been found already in IR, and its gravity would have been obvious for decades. There can't be anything that big out there.

Phil

Not at all. WISE has eliminated things bigger than Saturn, but there's plenty of room for a Neptune or smaller; and it's (as far as I'm concerned) always been the most parsimonious explanation for the presence of Sedna. But the other options are still in play, I think (passing star, cluster star birth, etc). I need to talk to Hal Levison.

[Lucas]

Emily,

Have you tried the JPL small-body database browser?

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2012...log=0;cad=0#orb

It's a little hard to zoom out properly, but if you're happy with showing most of the orbit, this could be good enough for now... I've attached a screenshot.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[alan]

Here's an article about this second one:
http://www.astrobio.net/components/com_new...ail.php?id=6082

...What’s more, their work indicates the potential presence of an enormous planet, perhaps up to 10 times the size of Earth, not yet seen, but possibly influencing the orbit of 2012 VP113, as well as other inner Oort cloud objects.

Yikes!
That would make this other embargoed discovery tame by comparison!

This was predicted a couple of years ago, from the 2012 DDA abstracts

...a PMSC has an important effect on objects at inner Oort cloud distances, say between 300 AU and 2000 AU, to make their perihelion distances to continually oscillate with a large enough amplitude to account for objects both inside and outside Neptune's orbit. This naturally produces an extra amount of TNO's with semimajor axes between 300 and 2000 AU and perihelion inside Neptune's orbit, like 2006 SQ372 and 2000 OO67....

... With the results from the numerical simulator we compare the model with and without the PMSC with observations. We conclude that a PMSC is compatible with the existence of 2006 SQ372 and 2000 OO67 and, in fact, although not conclusively, we can also claim that the observations of 2006 SQ372 and 2000 OO67, compared to all other scattered objects, would be lucky events if no PMSC exists.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012DDA....43.0501G

[Gerald]

According to my watch the embargo should be over now.

[Paolo]

ESO release: rings around Chariklo http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/ I am supposed to be acting surprised, right?