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Space

'Fossil' Discovered Beyond Pluto Implies 'Something Dramatic' Happened 400M Years Ago (space.com) 63

Posted by EditorDavid from the forbidden-planets dept.
"The distant reaches of the Solar System are still mysterious," writes ScienceAlert. "Not much sunlight pierces these regions, and there are strong hints that undiscovered objects lurk there. The objects that astronomers have discovered in these dim reaches are primordial, and their orbits suggest the presence of more undiscovered objects."

And now thanks to the giant 8.2-meter Subaru telescope at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatory, astronomers have discovered "a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto," reports Space.com. The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether.

The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion." The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun... This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years.

However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth. Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system.
There's "no viable transfer mechanisms" to explain the observed orbits "with the current configuration of planets," according to the team's recently-published paper. But since those orbits are stable, it "suggests that an external gravitational influence beyond those of the currently known Solar System planets is required to form their orbits." So where does that leave us? ScienceAlert summarizes the rest of the paper — and where things stand now: Astronomers have proposed many sources for this external gravitational influence, including interactions with a rogue planet or star, ancient stellar interactions from when the Sun was still in its natal cluster, and the capture of objects from other lower-mass stars in the Solar System's early times. But the explanation that gets the most attention is interactions with a hypothetical planet, Planet Nine.

If Planet Nine exists, it has a huge area to hide in. Some astronomers who have studied its potential existence think it could be the fifth largest planet in the Solar System. It would be so far away that it would be extremely dim. However, we may be on the cusp of detecting it, if it exists. The Vera Rubin Observatory recently saw first light and will begin its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will find transient events and objects in the Solar System like no other telescope before it. It's purpose-built to find hard-to-detect objects, and not even an elusive object like Planet Nine may be able to hide from it.

'Fossil' Discovered Beyond Pluto Implies 'Something Dramatic' Happened 400M Years Ago More | Reply

'Fossil' Discovered Beyond Pluto Implies 'Something Dramatic' Happened 400M Years Ago

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  • Sednoids (Score:3, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday July 20, 2025 @09:48PM (#65533764)

    Swollen areas in the vicinity of Sedna's bottom.

  • After mercury, venus, earth, and mars, it may be a rocky planet. I think that may be very interesting. If it exists, and if we can find it. It may have internal heat like the earth, it may support life.

  • That's pronounced "planet".

  • Learn to use a calendar. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Sunday July 20, 2025 @10:10PM (#65533786) Journal

    "400 million years ago" is not "400 million years after it's birth"

    Supposed to be "news for nerds", not "news for numbskulls".

    • Re:Learn to use a calendar. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Temkin ( 112574 ) on Sunday July 20, 2025 @10:31PM (#65533812)

      No kidding... I read the headline and was like "Whoa, is that the late Devonian extinction?" Nope... Hadean. Before even the late heavy bombardment...

      T

    • Yeah, I read it 400 million years ago instead of 400 million years after the solar system formation, aligning it with the catastrophism theories of Tom Van Flandern.

    • Whats so confusing about 400 years after the birth of the solar system? Seems pretty clear to me.

      • Nothing would be confusing about it if that's what was written. The summary says "400m years ago" - which is apparently incorrect.

    • "400 million years ago" is not "400 million years after it's birth"

      Supposed to be "news for nerds", not "news for numbskulls".

      Just to put that numbskull problem into perspective, every 12-month calendar on the planet is a rounding error based on religious events that occurred a blink of an eye ago according to the bigger picture. Not sure nitpicking really matters. Especially when we find out a century from now how wrong all of our estimates were. Which has happened a lot. A blink of an eye ago every numbskull believed a God in a chariot dragged the sun across the sky, with Earth being both the center of the universe and flat.

      • Ok, but the error between the headline and TFA is around 3.8 Billion years, based on the current estimate of the solar system's age.

        That's not a quibble, nor a rounding error.

      • True but irrelevant. No one mentioned months except you. A year is a well-defined natural event. Earth has an orbital period, which we call a “year”.

        • Ok, so in deference to you: "learn to use years". That makes more sense.

          • Really not sure what your point is. The scientific paper in the article found that a major event upset orbits around 400 million current Earth orbits after the creation of the solar system. On Earth, we that unit of time period a “year”. Is there some other word or measurement system you propose?

            • No, you brought up "months", and didn't like that for some reason. OK, don't bring it up if you don't like it. I was fine with "calendar", which shows a number of units.

              The point, as originally stated, is that the /. editor made a 3.8 billion year error. My ire is because the editing is total crap now.

              • My first reply was to geekmux, who disagreed with your original post and who first used the word “month” in “every 12-month calendar on the planet is a rounding error.”. My reply to geekmux was that a year is a natural measurement and not a human invention as part of a calendar. I agree with you: 400 million after solar system formation is not 400 million years ago. My second reply was the same point, I had t noticed it was to you rather than geekmux
    • Perhaps they’ve also discovered that the solar system is only 800 million years old. Joking aside exactly. Came to say exactly this.

  • Fuck you. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday July 20, 2025 @10:58PM (#65533826)

    NEVER start a sentence off "Fossil discovered beyond Pluto ..." .. Do you realize all the things that start spinning up in a brain when a sentence starts like that?

    • I think we should call it Plutosaurus Rex!

    • If you can answer 20 of these questions, your IQ is higher than 140.

      On the other hand, if you click on the link, that pretty much puts your IQ well below that value.

    • It is actually mis-rendered, the proper representation of the project's name is FOSSIL since it is an acronym and the project uses standard acronym style.

      If they had said "FOSSIL discovered ..." you would have a clue that the meaning of this is something other than its standard semantic interpretation.

  • can we name it 'Actual Pluto'?

  • Apart from the 400 million years error, the writing here is simply rubbish.

    Do the "editors" really think they can get away with shovelling unchecked AI slop at us ?

    • Apart from the 400 million years error, the writing here is simply rubbish.

      That was 400 million years after the birth of the solar system. Not an error. Means the orbits have been stable for over four billion years, and the perturbation was before that.

      Do the "editors" really think they can get away with shovelling unchecked AI slop at us ?

      In this case, I'm not seeing what signature of AI is here. There have been a number of articles in other popular science media sources about this. I consider all articles about "planet 9" to be pure speculation based on far too little hard evidence (considering observational bias, orbits of four Sedna-like objects is far too few to

    • Apart from the 400 million years error, the writing here is simply rubbish. Do the "editors" really think they can get away with shovelling unchecked AI slop at us ?

      I posit that you already know the answer to the question you end with. And that answer is a resounding, "Yes."

  • We have a picture of a planet 110 light years away from here, published within the last few months. We can measure the cosmic background radiation to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

    We have tools of insane levels of precision. How come we can't find some gravity object only a few light minutes away?

    • Because it's dark out there.

    • When looking for a picture of something, you're looking for a light reflection. The planet 110 light years away is close enough to its host start that it reflects a lot of light - to the point where there's still a tiny bit visible this far away. We also know exactly where to look - from this distance its basically right beside its star.

      Any hypothetic planet 9 though, is much, much farther from its parent star, and will reflect very, very little light. And what light it does reflect would have to travel d

    • That planet 110 light years away is easer to detect because of its proximity to a star. If there's a planet 9 somewhere in our orbit, it's too far away to reflect light. But it should be detectable when it crosses in front of bright objects. Researchers are "placing limits on a hypothetical planet 9's whereabouts", as per the article, and doing that lets them focus telescope and supercomputer time on areas that might provide better detection of low-albedo objects passing in front of stars and bright objects

      • That raises the question:

            How often does an object the size and distance of this planet occlude a star or other bright object ?
      • Sure, makes sense. But.. what about using other wavelengths? Perhaps infra red/heat? We can see the "edge of the universe" via temperature readings... that's pretty far away. or measure gravity? Planets must be a certain size, greater than a certain mass. Just throwing some ideas out. We have remarkably sensitive instruments, and whatever is really close on an astronomical scale.

  • Revisionist Fuckers (Score:5, Funny)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Monday July 21, 2025 @08:55AM (#65534356)

    Those revisionist fuckers did Pluto dirty. But, Pluto doesn't care. It's been around. It's seen some shit. It knows that things will oscillate back and it will be a planet again in less than half its orbital period.

    Filthy God damned apes.

  • ''Something Dramatic' Happened 400M Years Ago'
    'similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago.'
    '400 million years after its birth'

    Uh, when?

  • I got to see Mike Brown (@plutokiller) speak earlier this year. He said that if the Vera Rubin Observatory starts its principle mission October 1 as planned, it should detect Planet Nine by the end of the year. I guess that depends on its NSF-DOE funding holding up. P.S., Brown's 2010 book "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" is a very enjoyable read.

  • Hey (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy

    I see what you did there.

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