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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 ...
Morbidelli and Kenyon have suggested that Sedna did not originate in the Solar System, but was captured by the Sun from a passing extrasolar planetary system, specifically that of a brown dwarf about 1/20th the mass of the Sun (M ☉) [63] [64] [71] or a main-sequence star 80 percent more massive than the Sun, which, owing to its larger mass ...
[9] [19] It was initially estimated to be 300 km (190 mi) in diameter under the assumption of an albedo of 0.15, [5] though observations of a single-chord stellar occultation at Penticton, Canada on 20 October 2018 suggested a smaller diameter of 220 km (140 mi), corresponding to a higher albedo of 0.21.
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown. Estimates have run as high as 200 in the Kuiper belt [1] and over 10,000 in the region beyond. [2] However, consideration of the surprisingly low densities of many large trans-Neptunian objects, as well as spectroscopic analysis of their surfaces, suggests that the number of dwarf planets may be much lower, perhaps only nine among ...
The sednoids' orbits cannot be explained by perturbations from the giant planets, [9] nor by interaction with the galactic tides. [4] If they formed in their current locations, their orbits must originally have been circular; otherwise accretion (the coalescence of smaller bodies into larger ones) would not have been possible because the large relative velocities between planetesimals would ...
The pull of the Sun's gravity caused it to speed up until it reached its maximum speed of 87.71 km/s (315,800 km/h; 196,200 mph) as it passed south of the ecliptic on 6 September, where the Sun's gravity bent its orbit in a sharp turn northward at its closest approach (perihelion) on 9 September at a distance of 0.255 AU (38,100,000 km ...
[2] [58] It retained this distinction until the discovery of 2018 VG 18 in 2018. [ 59 ] As of 2008, there were approximately forty known TNOs , most notably 2006 SQ 372 , 2000 OO 67 and Sedna , that are currently closer to the Sun than Eris, even though their semimajor axis is larger than that of Eris (67.8 AU).
2018 VG 18 is the second-most distant natural object ever observed in the Solar System, after 2018 AG 37 (132 AU), which was also discovered by Sheppard's team in January 2018. As of 2024 [update] , 2018 VG 18 is 123.6 AU (18 billion km) from the Sun and is moving farther away until it reaches aphelion in 2063. [ 8 ]