CITA@40 Conference

A Dwarf Planet on an Extremely Wide Orbit

Not scheduled

20m

McLennan Physical Laboratories (60 St. George St.)

Oral

Speaker

Sihao Cheng (Perimeter Institute & Institute for Advanced Study)

Description

I will discuss a recent discovery of a trans-Neptunian object (TNO), 2017 OF201, out of a systematic search of outer Solar System objects using archival imaging surveys. 2017 OF201 is interesting in three ways. (1) It is large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. (2) Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with (a, q, i) = (850 au, 45 au, 16 deg) precisely determined from 24 observations over 20 years. In fact, it has the widest orbit among all dwarf planet candidates. (3) Its orbital orientation lies well outside the claimed clustering of other extremely TNOs, posing a challenge to the Planet-Nine hypothesis.