The orbit of the dwarf planet “2015 TG387”, or the “Goblin”, whose discovery was announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Center for Small Planets, could be the key to reaching the mysterious “Planet X”, which would be far beyond Pluto, which was no longer considered a planet in 2006 and was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
The announcement was made after three years of research with the help of the Japanese Subaru telescope, located in Hawaii, in the United States, and reveals that the orbit of the new object, which is very far from the Sun, supports the idea of the existence of a planet even further away. distant and larger, a “Super Earth”.
Scientists claim that the “Goblin” would be a small indicator of the presence of the hypothetical “Planet X”, a giant that they believe exists in the farthest reaches of the Solar System.
But why does a dwarf object function as a signal of the existence of an immense celestial body?
The study that located the small planet of around 300 km in diameter was carried out by the Carnegie Institute for Science, Northern Arizona University and the University of Hawaii.
The Goblin is 2,300 times further from the Sun than the Earth and approximately two and a half times further than Pluto is from the Sun and, as a result, the dwarf planet would take more than 40 thousand years to take a walk around our star.
Scientists estimate that its slowness could be due to the “proximity” of another body much larger than itself.
The Goblin is one of the few known objects that never come close enough to the Solar System’s giant planets, such as Neptune and Jupiter, to have significant gravitational interactions with them.
Its long orbit, like that of two other similar objects discovered in 2014, appears to be influenced by the gravity of another large object, which may be 10 times larger than Earth, and this supermassive object could be the so-called “Planet X”.
Planet X
According to the Carnegie Institute, the research that resulted in the discovery is the largest and deepest ever carried out on distant objects in the Solar System.
“These distant objects like Goblin are like the breadcrumbs that lead us to Planet X. The more we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible planet we believe is shaping its orbits,” said the head of study, Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution.
Sheppard states that “these discoveries would redefine our knowledge of the evolution of the Solar System.”
Astronomer David Tholen, from the University of Hawaii, adds: “We think there could be thousands of small bodies like ‘2015 TG387’ on the fringes of the Solar System, but their distance makes finding them very difficult.”
Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University and co-discoverer of the dwarf planet, adds that the discovery “still doesn’t prove there’s another massive planet in our solar system, but it’s more evidence that there could be something big out there.”
