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Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometres; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi).
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
Like Pluto, its orbit is highly eccentric, with a perihelion of 38.2 AU (roughly Pluto's distance from the Sun) and an aphelion of 97.6 AU, and steeply inclined to the ecliptic plane at an angle of 44°. [222] Gonggong (33.8–101.2 AU) is a dwarf planet in a comparable orbit to Eris, except that it is in a 3:10 resonance with Neptune.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how far Pluto is from the sun. The correct number is 3.7 billion miles.) ... Pluto was always in a tough spot when it came to being a planet ...
A light-minute is 60 light-seconds, and so the average distance between Earth and the Sun is 8.317 light-minutes. The average distance between Pluto and the Sun (34.72 AU [5]) is 4.81 light-hours. [6] Humanity's most distant artificial object, Voyager 1, has an interstellar velocity of 3.57 AU per year, [7] or 29.7 light-minutes per year. [8]
Euler diagram showing the types of bodies orbiting the Sun. The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun. Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more. The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. 2021 PH27; Mercury
The orbit of Sedna (red) set against the orbits of outer Solar System objects (Pluto's orbit is purple). This is a list of Solar System objects by greatest aphelion or the greatest distance from the Sun that the orbit could take it if the Sun and object were the only objects in the universe.
The Kuiper belt and Neptune may be treated as a marker of the extent of the Solar System, alternatives being the heliopause and the distance at which the Sun's gravitational influence is matched by that of other stars (estimated to be between 50 000 AU and 125 000 AU). [22]