Astronomers Discover Rare Distant Object in Sync with Neptune

https://pweb.cfa.harvard.edu/news/astronomers-discover-rare-distant-object-sync-neptune

55•MaysonL•6mo ago

Comments

ghssds•6mo ago

What is the meaning of the word "rare" in the context of astronomy? It seems to me calling the object discussed in the article "rare" is about as logical as saying the Earth is rare: of course a single object is rare.

dmix•6mo ago

Well there's a few thousand trans-neptunian objects that have been discovered. I presume rare here is for the orbit pattern being perfectly in sync with Neptune itself.

adrian_b•6mo ago

There already are known many trans-neptunian bodies whose movements are synchronized with Neptune. Pluto is also among those.

However all the others are closer to Neptune, therefore the ratios between their revolution periods an that of Neptune are relatively small rational numbers, while for this new object the ratio is 10, which is much greater.

So for now, it is one such object among many, so it may be called "rare", at least until others are discovered. In any case it was unexpected that resonances still exist at such distances.

bradly•6mo ago

I noticed this in another article recently referring to interstellar comets as extremely rare, when what the author I think meant was interstellar comets in our solar system are rare.

dreamcompiler•6mo ago

3-body problems are fun and there are still potentially a ton of resonances that have never been found, and that cannot be found analytically. This seems to be one of those.

TheHeasman•6mo ago

"The survey was designed to search for bodies with orbits that extend far above and below the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, part of the outer solar system that hasn’t been well-studied."

Christ. I didn't realise we hadn't looked at stuff not in Earth's plane. That's a tonne of space to explore, right in our own backyard.

Terr_•6mo ago

Just because there's a lot of space doesn't mean there's a lot of stuff to find in it. :p

jajko•6mo ago

Sun's rotation over time sort of aligns everything on that plane (or maintains momentum from accretion disk), galaxies are mostly also in disc forms. Pluto is a bit of an outlier, I wonder if due to some ancient collision or some other force.

So yes its a vast space (2D -> 3D), but should be rather empty no?

svpk•6mo ago

In my understanding no. Observation of other star systems has shown that ours is somewhat anomalous in being aligned to a plane.

dr_dshiv•6mo ago

Source?

Terr_•6mo ago

AFAICT most of the systems we've found with >1 exoplanet resemble our own system, where the planets are moving in roughly the same plane. If you look at this catalogue [0], the "i" value refers to the inclination of the orbit as viewed from Earth, since the parent star's rotation is often unknown. Still, it can be used to compare planets with others in the same system.

The closest I can find to your claim is some stuff from 2010 [1] (many exoplanet discoveries ago) claiming that a significant portion of "hot jupiter" setups are weird.

[0] https://exoplanet.eu/catalog/

[1] https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1016/

kuschku•6mo ago

> Pluto is a bit of an outlier, I wonder if due to some ancient collision or some other force.

That's something most asteroids and trans-neptunian objects have in common, they're on eccentric orbits outside of the plane.

cnity•6mo ago

Well you might find, for example, a rare distant object in sync with Neptune.

venusenvy47•6mo ago

But isn't the Oort Cloud is a sphere around the sun? I've always wondered why the planets and Kuiper belt have a preferred disc, but Oort doesn't.

yencabulator•6mo ago

One theory is that interactions and collisions (all scales: gas, dust, comet, planet) are what cause the participants to align in the direction of the original net angular momentum, and the Oort cloud is just too sparse to that have happened as much.

Oort dust clumped up to comet-size objects for sure, but that tended to happen for the particles that were already roughly in the same orbit. Looking at all orbits in the Oort cloud, they remained more random.

jsbisviewtiful•6mo ago

> but should be rather empty no?

JWST has already challenged a lot of our perceived notions about the cosmos. Always worth checking more thoroughly and reexamining our theories as technology advances.

kgwxd•6mo ago

phew, i thought the CEO kisscam story made HN front page for a few words there.

phkahler•6mo ago

I thought such resonance was unstable. Isn't that the reason for the gaps in Saturn's rings?

nixass•6mo ago

ZOZOVN

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

Speed up responses with fast mode

Software factories and the agentic moment

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

LLMs as the new high level language

First Proof

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Vouch

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Show HN: Axiomeer – An open marketplace for AI agents

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

Selection rather than prediction

The F Word

The silent death of good code

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Where did all the starships go?

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox