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A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

638 points by MKais 5y ago

ceejayoz 5y ago
> could possibly reach magnitude 13 in early 2031 Don't get too excited about looking at this one; that's a bit brighter than Pluto, so you'd need a pretty decent telescope to spot it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)#Examples
- Sharlin 5y ago
  I believe this is absolute magnitude, and specifically, absolute magnitude as defined for comets [1]. At Saturn's distance, definitely not a naked-eye object in any case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Cometary_magnitudes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Cometary_ma...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Not in this case: the +13 figure is a predicted *apparent* magnitude. The absolute magnitude 'H' as your link defines is the 'H' field in the OP link, which is +7.8. (Note that's 'H' from your link's section on asteroid magnitudes, not comets or stars -- they're all on different scales). Here's the documentation for the fields in OP's data table: "H Absolute visual magnitude. A table converting H to a diameter is available." https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/OrbElsExplanation.html https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/OrbElsExplanation...
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      Ah, thanks. So its H_asteroid is currently +7.8, and if/when it develops a coma it should become a lot brighter, but unfortunately even at perihelion still way too faint for a naked eye.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I think it is not so exceptional, it is just this is one of the first ones we spotted. Practically "outer solar system objects" and "interstellar objects" are overlapping categories since there is transport between the two.
MKais 5y ago
How fast can we build and launch something to rendezvous with this dwarf planet?
- jessriedel 5y ago
  New Horizons took a nearly straight shot to Pluto (just stopping by Jupiter on the way for a gravity assist). That trip took 9 years to travel 40 AU (not at constant speed, of courses, since it's constantly being drawn toward the Sun). This dwarf planet makes its closest approach at 10 AU, so you could do a fly by in less than 3 years if you wanted to pay for it. However, the science return from a flyby would be limited compared to falling into orbit around it. Rosetta took 10 years to match pace with and orbit a comet (which had a closest approach to the Sun less than 1 AU) using a number of gravity assists. https://raminskibba.net/2014/08/17/rosetta-and-the-comet/amp/ https://raminskibba.net/2014/08/17/rosetta-and-the-comet/amp... https://raminskibba.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/f4-large.jpg?w=600&h=430 https://raminskibba.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/f4-large.jpg...
  - messe 5y ago
    Getting into orbit would be rather difficult, as the probe would have have to match the planets velocity at perihelion. My instinct says it’s probably just on the edge of doable (although I’m not sure on which side), but I haven’t crunched the numbers. It would almost certainly need to be launched on a Delta-IV or Falcon Heavy class vehicle. EDIT: s/perigee/perihelion. I could say periapse and be neutral, but perihelion sounds cool.
    - jessriedel 5y ago
      The speed of Rosetta's comet at perigee is, I think, significantly grater than the max speed of this dwarf planet. The dwarf planet has a much higher apogee, of course, but escape velocity, corresponding to infinite apogee, is finite and not that large, and Rosetta had to go much deeper into the Sun's gravity well. So, as a non-expert who hasn't done the numbers, I'd guess matching pace with the dwarf planet would be easier (requiring less delta V and/or gravity assists) than Rosetta with the comet.
orliesaurus 5y ago
I wonder how/IF this will cause anything to spike solar flares? that's what's scary to me - all it takes is one big burst and bye bye to our tech....
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  A dwarf planet wandering around Saturn's orbit isn't gonna do very much to the Sun.
- _Microft 5y ago
  No, no need to worry. Coronal mass ejections causing geomagnetic storms are really something to worry about but this thing is just a piece of rock flying around the Sun at very far distances (from our point of view). It is coming no closer than eleven astronomical units to Sun (1 AU is the mean distance of Earth to Sun).
  - orliesaurus 5y ago
    Yeah I totally misunderstood the distances - my bad.
    - _Microft 5y ago
      There is a website that visualizes the distances in the solar system at the scale of 1 pixel to the diameter of Moon. In the lower right corner there is a symbol with a "C" and some lines around it that makes you automatically travel at the speed of light. Start the journey, put it on an extra screen if you have one and see nothing happen for most of the time ;) The current distance from Sun is shown in the bottom center and you can change units in the menu attached to it. "Astronomical units" or "light minutes" might be the most useful, kilometers or miles if you just want to be blown away by the order of magnitude. https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... I also submitted it for discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 Edit: fixed the scale, it's 1px:diameter of Moon, not 1px:distance Earth-Moon as I initially wrote.
mcorning 5y ago
For reference 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) is about 150 million km. Saturn ranges from being about 7 to 11 AU away from Earth. Voyager 1 is 152 AU away. This object is excitingly close and will be fun to study.
- lopuhin 5y ago
  I don't think Saturn comes that close, should be 8 AU at best, given that perihelion is at 9 AU.
  - mcorning 5y ago
    https://www.universetoday.com/15311/how-far-is-saturn-from-earth/ https://www.universetoday.com/15311/how-far-is-saturn-from-e... > For the sake of simplicity, Saturn is 1.2 billion km, roughly 7 AU, from the Earth when the two are at their closest approach to one another. They are 1.67 billion km, around 11 AU, from each other when they are at their most distant. Saturn and Earth are the closest to each other when they are on the same side of the Sun and at similar points in their orbits. The are the most distant when on opposite sides of the Sun.
    - Denvercoder9 5y ago
      > Saturn is 1.2 billion km, roughly 7 AU That's a unit conversion error. 1.2 billion / 150 million is 8, not 7.
      - jakeinspace 5y ago
        I believe the 1.2B km was referencing mean orbital distance from the sun, which would be 8 AU, and therefore 7 AU from earth on closest approach.
        Denvercoder9 5y ago
        No. Saturn's perihelion (closest distance to the Sun) is 1.35B km (9.0 AU), its aphelion (furthest distance) is 1.51B km (10.1 AU), and its mean distance is 1.43B km (9.6 AU). Thus, at closest approach Saturn is 8 AU from Earth (since Earth orbits at an almost-constant 1 AU from the Sun).
ptcrash 5y ago
Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?
- clajiness 5y ago
  > its orbit takes it from just beyond the orbit of Saturn (10.9 AU) all the way out to the Oort Cloud It looks like it currently orbits the sun.
  - ptcrash 5y ago
    Ah, for some reason I read the original message as some new dwarf planet was outside our solar system and had a trajectory towards it. Thanks for the clarification.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    According to the link, the outgoing aphelion will be almost 40% more than the previous one, so I wouldn't assume it's going to orbit indefinitely.
    - elihu 5y ago
      That seems awfully weird. Is that something that things orbiting the sun normally do?
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        My intuition is that anything with a really eccentric orbit (10s to 10s of thousands of AU) has more of a chance of passing through many gravitational fields that change its orbit.
        elihu 5y ago
        I suppose that makes sense... if something is in an orbit that's flattened down until it's only slightly off from being a straight line in and out, then any very slight perturbations could really affect how close it comes to the sun on the next pass. The sun moves too a little bit, due to the pull of the planets. Maybe it's enough to make a difference?
pavel_lishin 5y ago
Aw, I thought this was going to be an extrasolar object, but it's an oort object orbiting the sun. It's also pretty small, about 1/20th the size of the moon. Huge for a comet, but smaller than Ceres.
- sam-2727 5y ago
  It can definitely feel not as cool from a popular science perspective but there are many unanswered questions about the Oort Cloud so study of this object would be scientifically invaluable, even if it doesn't yield any "pop-sci" results.
Meerax 5y ago
Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
- jessriedel 5y ago
  If you launch your telescope on a spacecraft and get it to match speed with the dwarf planet (which is necessary for a soft landing), there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet. That just blocks the view of half the sky. Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.
  - vmception 5y ago
    and frozen aliens
    - seaman1921 5y ago
      perhaps the sun's heat exposes them :)
      - egman_ekki 5y ago
        ...that must be the delivery of ufoporno I ordered in good'ol devonian times :)
  - tonmoy 5y ago
    Is that really true? If we manage to get a spacecraft get captured by the dwarf planet's gravity and orbit it, would that not be a lot less delta-V compared to if we made the spacecraft achieve the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun just by itself?
    - isoprophlex 5y ago
      It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...
Asraelite 5y ago
The post says "Incl. 95.46628 +/- 0.000052". Am I right to interpret this as meaning that the body has an extreme inclination, almost in polar orbit of the Sun? That would be pretty interesting; it would mean an orbit completely out of line with the rest of the Solar System.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sam-2727 5y ago
  Certainly interesting, but not necessarily surprising. The Oort Cloud is roughly spherical so inclination would be expected to be isotropic overall. On average there will be less high inclination bodies (isotropic inclination has a pdf of sin(i)) but they will still exist.
- nwallin 5y ago
  Yes. But it's not that interesting or unusual. The Oort cloud doesn't really obey the plane of the solar system the way the planets or Kuiper belt do. That's why it's called a 'cloud' and not a 'belt'.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Yes. It is the perfect place to host a berserker. It has an orbital period of 3 million years, so it will be its first site of humanity.
ernst_mulder 5y ago
Before I read that it is actually orbiting our star I briefly thought "maybe they had an accident with a nuclear waste dump on the far side of their planet"
jbverschoor 5y ago
Is that Nibiru?
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Too small, maybe a generation ship on approach?
  - optimalsolver 5y ago
    We shall call it...Rama.
nealabq 5y ago
For now they're calling it 2014 UN271. It's got a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_UN271 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_UN271 I suppose it'll get named soon.
ncmncm 5y ago
Cue, Avi Loeb insisting this is a follow-up to Uomuamua...
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Will this disturb longterm orbiting bodies (with exotic orbits) and drive them into the inner system, without the guardians able to catch?
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I don’t think so, to a meaningful extent. There’s already lots of stuff out in the Oort Cloud with orbits out of the regular planar disk.
pfdietz 5y ago
This is actually terrifying. That body is on a cometary orbit, and need not be stable long term. If it's chaotically pushed around by the major outer planets it might get sent into an orbit that gets into the inner solar system. And if something that size hit Earth, it would be game over for life here -- the impact would vaporize much or all of the oceans. Even an impact by something the size of comet Hale-Bopp would destroy all higher life on the planet. The chance of impacts like this may have been underestimated because of anthropic selection -- if any had occurred in the past (say) 1 billion years then we would not be here.
- mabbo 5y ago
  It's expected orbit will take it around 54,600 AU from the Sun. The orbital period of something that far out is in the millions of years range. If it doesn't kill us this time, rest assured by the time it comes back we'll have done the job properly already.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    I'm more referring to objects of this kind, not this specific object. Threats from supercomets are not a new concern: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/448/1/27/990672 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/448/1/27/990672 "A 100 km comet striking the Earth would carry ∼1000 times the energy involved in the creation of the 150 km Chicxulub crater and would presumably remove the surface biosphere"
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I think people have suggested the dinosaur killing asteroid may have caused global fires and rain of molten rock, so that scale might be sufficient as far as humans are concerned.
      - matkoniecz 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A - simulation of impact. Note scale - both size and time. Note rebound that briefly created one of largest peaks in Earths history. And curtain of ejecta. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... (note: popscience and old! let me know if any here got disproved or there is more up to date material) Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling. The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt. Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil. Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.
34679 5y ago
>almost undoubtedly the largest Oort Cloud object ever discovered- almost in dwarf planet territory! Not a dwarf planet.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Thus, "almost". But big enough to be spherical. Or to eliminate multicellular life on Earth, if it hit us.
  - djmips 5y ago
    C'mon maybe a few multicellular lifeforms would survive. What about everyone's favorite tardigrade?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Sure, but do they count? They would survive in the heart of a star.
  - 34679 5y ago
    The headline does not contain "almost".
epaulson 5y ago
I went looking for a visualization of this orbit, and I found this tweet: https://twitter.com/rappolee/status/1406414441663528966 https://twitter.com/rappolee/status/1406414441663528966
mekkkkkk 5y ago
I know very little about the subject, but does this mean that there are planet-sized objects in orbit around the sun of which we are unaware of?
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  There definitely are. A major reason for "demoting" Pluto was there are more such Pluto-scale planets in the Kuiper belt. Maybe we will find one bigger than Pluto.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    Thanks! That's wild to me. All talk about exoplanets and other pop-sci headlines makes you think we would have our own backyard figured out. Then again, I suppose the vastness of space is vast even within our solar system.
    - joeyh 5y ago
      Big backyard.. The Oort cloud extends a sizable fraction of the distance to Alpha Centari. No spacecraft has reached it and very little is known. It's remarkable that this dwarf planet's orbit reaches it. Its aphelion is 54,600 AU, or 0.86 light years!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bnjemian 5y ago
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  But why? Don't we already have a moon?
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Think of all of the opportunities to write software to calculate the complicated changes required for astrology.
  - legostormtroopr 5y ago
    We have moon, but what about second moon?
    - throwaway378037 5y ago
      I don’t think he knows about second moon!
    - disillusioned 5y ago
      What if, and hear me out here, we give _our_ moon its _own_ moon? Like letting my dog have a lizard for a pet!
  - rishav_sharan 5y ago
    It's like asking, why have 2nd breakfast when you had one breakfast. We must channel our inner hobbits and think big
- Koshkin 5y ago
  R-right... What can go wrong?
- sneak 5y ago
designium 5y ago
swap dwarf planet for a neutron star and you have "Dragon's Egg" story.
kpozin 5y ago
Note that dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun at ~3 AU, is larger (⌀ = 939 km) than this one (⌀ = 100–200 km). There are ~25 other known asteroids with diameters over 200 km in the asteroid belt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#Largest_by_diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#...).
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Right, but the composition is likely very very different.
- zksmk 5y ago
  Right, but it's not the size that counts, it's the motion in the ocean. And what's on the inside. This little guy's from the Oort cloud. He's been places, he's seen things.
kumarvvr 5y ago
Ok. I got really excited by the title. But the diameter of the planet is about 130 km, so its tiny. Maybe "fat asteroid" is a better term than "dwarf planet" ?
- yummybear 5y ago
  I don't think we should be shaming asteroids in this way - how about "gravitationally challenged"?
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    Sure. In that vein, "differently sized" should also be ok.
phy6 5y ago
Meme stock apes have claimed this as the new destination of their portfolios.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
How is it possible to have an orbit without the sun at the center?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  An elliptical orbit has, instead of a center, two foci, or focuses. In a very eccentric, or sharp and skinny, ellipse like this object's orbit, there is a focus very close to each pointy end. The sun is at one of these. (There is nothing at the other.) At the point of closest approach to the sun somewhere inside (the radius of) Saturn's orbit, it will be going twice as fast as Saturn, but at almost a right angle to it, swinging past the south pole of the sun, and will then shoot out to an immense distance, slowing all the way until it slows down enough to fall back in again for another go.
tigerlily 5y ago
groups.io I had never come across before. Praised be Mark Fletcher!
varjag 5y ago
In its apogee it is 0.85 light years away from the Sun.
andy_ppp 5y ago
Okay so if this was a direct hit, what would happen!? Would it just be a non event for the sun or could we expect higher temperatures on Earth or worse?
- EdSchouten 5y ago
  It's apparently pretty hard to hit the Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g (Though that video mostly talks about small objects like rockets. Maybe it's a different story for dwarf planets?) That said... Keep in mind that this is about a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun. It's 11 AU out, so twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter is.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    More importantly the video mostly talks about hitting the Sun from a platform like Earth already closely orbiting the Sun, which is not the same thing as arriving practically from interstellar space. That's much more important than the size of anything. If you were to make a velocity change to this object in its aphelion to make it hit the Sun, it would be vastly easier (at least per unit of weight) than do the same with a probe launched from Earth.
- hedshodd 5y ago
  A direct hit with the sun? Maybe slightly higher temperatures if the "impact site" was facing us, but not for long because the sun is highly convective and each "longitudinal ring" on the sun rotates differentially, thus dissipating the effects of that impact very very quickly. A good chunk of it would also probably burn up before even reaching the Sun, but how much of it is hard to say. But keep in mind, it says "within 11 AU of the Sun", which is still beyond Saturn; Saturn's 9.5 AU away from the Sun, and Uranus is about 19 AU away from the Sun. So it's still pretty far away.
andy_ppp 5y ago
Suppose this, if there are advanced civilisations doing interstellar travel and there really is a 200km object that could hit Earth (I understand this is too far out), what would be the way to ask them for help?
- napolux 5y ago
  pray
- subroutine 5y ago
  Shoot a rocket into outer-space with a bunch of full human genomes (sequencing data), a backup of the internet, and a readme. The probability of a starship being within 5 lightyears of earth is likely zero. If there is one, it's probably because it's already on its way here.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    Who is to say we aren't the product of such a disaster...
    - subroutine 5y ago
      What do you mean "product"? Like... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
  - blocked_again 5y ago
    This is under the assumption that advancee civilizations can travel only as fast as speed of light. There is also a possibility that there are advanced civilizations that jailbreaked the Universe/Reality and can be anywhere in seconds. Whether they give a shit about primitive civilizations like us who invented decent computers only like fifty years back is a different question altogether.
    - subroutine 5y ago
bencollier49 5y ago
If this is coming within range of the Oort cloud, ought we to be worried about being showered with perturbed meteors?
residualmind 5y ago
While scientifically-minded folks are excited for a new object of study, or simply something awesome in the night sky - I can't wait until I see the first doomsday predictions by people with a different mindset... In a way it is also an object of study for those world views ;)
AudreyDoka 5y ago
Pas mal.
AudreyDoka 5y ago
Pas mal mais je connais pas trop son rôle.
Rerarom 5y ago
First read this as "dwarf star" and was really excited
Flow 5y ago
Could Hubble and/or James Webb Telescope see this object with any clarity or is it too near?
hasmanean 5y ago
Hang a giant sign on it saying “Dantooine or bust.”

638 points by MKais 5y ago

> could possibly reach magnitude 13 in early 2031 Don't get too excited about looking at this one; that's a bit brighter than Pluto, so you'd need a pretty decent telescope to spot it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitude_(astronomy)#Examples

Sharlin 5y ago
I believe this is absolute magnitude, and specifically, absolute magnitude as defined for comets [1]. At Saturn's distance, definitely not a naked-eye object in any case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Cometary_magnitudes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Cometary_ma...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- perihelions 5y ago
  Not in this case: the +13 figure is a predicted *apparent* magnitude. The absolute magnitude 'H' as your link defines is the 'H' field in the OP link, which is +7.8. (Note that's 'H' from your link's section on asteroid magnitudes, not comets or stars -- they're all on different scales). Here's the documentation for the fields in OP's data table: "H Absolute visual magnitude. A table converting H to a diameter is available." https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/OrbElsExplanation.html https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/OrbElsExplanation...
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    Ah, thanks. So its H_asteroid is currently +7.8, and if/when it develops a coma it should become a lot brighter, but unfortunately even at perihelion still way too faint for a naked eye.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I think it is not so exceptional, it is just this is one of the first ones we spotted. Practically "outer solar system objects" and "interstellar objects" are overlapping categories since there is transport between the two.

MKais 5y ago

How fast can we build and launch something to rendezvous with this dwarf planet?

jessriedel 5y ago
New Horizons took a nearly straight shot to Pluto (just stopping by Jupiter on the way for a gravity assist). That trip took 9 years to travel 40 AU (not at constant speed, of courses, since it's constantly being drawn toward the Sun). This dwarf planet makes its closest approach at 10 AU, so you could do a fly by in less than 3 years if you wanted to pay for it. However, the science return from a flyby would be limited compared to falling into orbit around it. Rosetta took 10 years to match pace with and orbit a comet (which had a closest approach to the Sun less than 1 AU) using a number of gravity assists. https://raminskibba.net/2014/08/17/rosetta-and-the-comet/amp/ https://raminskibba.net/2014/08/17/rosetta-and-the-comet/amp... https://raminskibba.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/f4-large.jpg?w=600&h=430 https://raminskibba.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/f4-large.jpg...
- messe 5y ago
  Getting into orbit would be rather difficult, as the probe would have have to match the planets velocity at perihelion. My instinct says it’s probably just on the edge of doable (although I’m not sure on which side), but I haven’t crunched the numbers. It would almost certainly need to be launched on a Delta-IV or Falcon Heavy class vehicle. EDIT: s/perigee/perihelion. I could say periapse and be neutral, but perihelion sounds cool.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    The speed of Rosetta's comet at perigee is, I think, significantly grater than the max speed of this dwarf planet. The dwarf planet has a much higher apogee, of course, but escape velocity, corresponding to infinite apogee, is finite and not that large, and Rosetta had to go much deeper into the Sun's gravity well. So, as a non-expert who hasn't done the numbers, I'd guess matching pace with the dwarf planet would be easier (requiring less delta V and/or gravity assists) than Rosetta with the comet.

orliesaurus 5y ago

I wonder how/IF this will cause anything to spike solar flares? that's what's scary to me - all it takes is one big burst and bye bye to our tech....

ceejayoz 5y ago
A dwarf planet wandering around Saturn's orbit isn't gonna do very much to the Sun.
_Microft 5y ago
No, no need to worry. Coronal mass ejections causing geomagnetic storms are really something to worry about but this thing is just a piece of rock flying around the Sun at very far distances (from our point of view). It is coming no closer than eleven astronomical units to Sun (1 AU is the mean distance of Earth to Sun).
- orliesaurus 5y ago
  Yeah I totally misunderstood the distances - my bad.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    There is a website that visualizes the distances in the solar system at the scale of 1 pixel to the diameter of Moon. In the lower right corner there is a symbol with a "C" and some lines around it that makes you automatically travel at the speed of light. Start the journey, put it on an extra screen if you have one and see nothing happen for most of the time ;) The current distance from Sun is shown in the bottom center and you can change units in the menu attached to it. "Astronomical units" or "light minutes" might be the most useful, kilometers or miles if you just want to be blown away by the order of magnitude. https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... I also submitted it for discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 Edit: fixed the scale, it's 1px:diameter of Moon, not 1px:distance Earth-Moon as I initially wrote.

mcorning 5y ago

For reference 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) is about 150 million km. Saturn ranges from being about 7 to 11 AU away from Earth. Voyager 1 is 152 AU away. This object is excitingly close and will be fun to study.

lopuhin 5y ago
I don't think Saturn comes that close, should be 8 AU at best, given that perihelion is at 9 AU.
- mcorning 5y ago
  https://www.universetoday.com/15311/how-far-is-saturn-from-earth/ https://www.universetoday.com/15311/how-far-is-saturn-from-e... > For the sake of simplicity, Saturn is 1.2 billion km, roughly 7 AU, from the Earth when the two are at their closest approach to one another. They are 1.67 billion km, around 11 AU, from each other when they are at their most distant. Saturn and Earth are the closest to each other when they are on the same side of the Sun and at similar points in their orbits. The are the most distant when on opposite sides of the Sun.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    > Saturn is 1.2 billion km, roughly 7 AU That's a unit conversion error. 1.2 billion / 150 million is 8, not 7.
    - jakeinspace 5y ago
      I believe the 1.2B km was referencing mean orbital distance from the sun, which would be 8 AU, and therefore 7 AU from earth on closest approach.
      - Denvercoder9 5y ago
        No. Saturn's perihelion (closest distance to the Sun) is 1.35B km (9.0 AU), its aphelion (furthest distance) is 1.51B km (10.1 AU), and its mean distance is 1.43B km (9.6 AU). Thus, at closest approach Saturn is 8 AU from Earth (since Earth orbits at an almost-constant 1 AU from the Sun).

ptcrash 5y ago

Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?

clajiness 5y ago
> its orbit takes it from just beyond the orbit of Saturn (10.9 AU) all the way out to the Oort Cloud It looks like it currently orbits the sun.
- ptcrash 5y ago
  Ah, for some reason I read the original message as some new dwarf planet was outside our solar system and had a trajectory towards it. Thanks for the clarification.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  According to the link, the outgoing aphelion will be almost 40% more than the previous one, so I wouldn't assume it's going to orbit indefinitely.
  - elihu 5y ago
    That seems awfully weird. Is that something that things orbiting the sun normally do?
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      My intuition is that anything with a really eccentric orbit (10s to 10s of thousands of AU) has more of a chance of passing through many gravitational fields that change its orbit.
      - elihu 5y ago
        I suppose that makes sense... if something is in an orbit that's flattened down until it's only slightly off from being a straight line in and out, then any very slight perturbations could really affect how close it comes to the sun on the next pass. The sun moves too a little bit, due to the pull of the planets. Maybe it's enough to make a difference?

pavel_lishin 5y ago

Aw, I thought this was going to be an extrasolar object, but it's an oort object orbiting the sun. It's also pretty small, about 1/20th the size of the moon. Huge for a comet, but smaller than Ceres.

sam-2727 5y ago
It can definitely feel not as cool from a popular science perspective but there are many unanswered questions about the Oort Cloud so study of this object would be scientifically invaluable, even if it doesn't yield any "pop-sci" results.

Meerax 5y ago

Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?

jessriedel 5y ago
If you launch your telescope on a spacecraft and get it to match speed with the dwarf planet (which is necessary for a soft landing), there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet. That just blocks the view of half the sky. Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.
- vmception 5y ago
  and frozen aliens
  - seaman1921 5y ago
    perhaps the sun's heat exposes them :)
    - egman_ekki 5y ago
      ...that must be the delivery of ufoporno I ordered in good'ol devonian times :)
- tonmoy 5y ago
  Is that really true? If we manage to get a spacecraft get captured by the dwarf planet's gravity and orbit it, would that not be a lot less delta-V compared to if we made the spacecraft achieve the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun just by itself?
  - isoprophlex 5y ago
    It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...

Asraelite 5y ago

The post says "Incl. 95.46628 +/- 0.000052". Am I right to interpret this as meaning that the body has an extreme inclination, almost in polar orbit of the Sun? That would be pretty interesting; it would mean an orbit completely out of line with the rest of the Solar System.

deleted 5y ago
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sam-2727 5y ago
Certainly interesting, but not necessarily surprising. The Oort Cloud is roughly spherical so inclination would be expected to be isotropic overall. On average there will be less high inclination bodies (isotropic inclination has a pdf of sin(i)) but they will still exist.
nwallin 5y ago
Yes. But it's not that interesting or unusual. The Oort cloud doesn't really obey the plane of the solar system the way the planets or Kuiper belt do. That's why it's called a 'cloud' and not a 'belt'.
koheripbal 5y ago
Yes. It is the perfect place to host a berserker. It has an orbital period of 3 million years, so it will be its first site of humanity.

ernst_mulder 5y ago

Before I read that it is actually orbiting our star I briefly thought "maybe they had an accident with a nuclear waste dump on the far side of their planet"

jbverschoor 5y ago

Is that Nibiru?

throwaway316943 5y ago
Too small, maybe a generation ship on approach?
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  We shall call it...Rama.

nealabq 5y ago

For now they're calling it 2014 UN271. It's got a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_UN271 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_UN271 I suppose it'll get named soon.

ncmncm 5y ago

Cue, Avi Loeb insisting this is a follow-up to Uomuamua...

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Will this disturb longterm orbiting bodies (with exotic orbits) and drive them into the inner system, without the guardians able to catch?

NegativeLatency 5y ago
I don’t think so, to a meaningful extent. There’s already lots of stuff out in the Oort Cloud with orbits out of the regular planar disk.

pfdietz 5y ago

This is actually terrifying. That body is on a cometary orbit, and need not be stable long term. If it's chaotically pushed around by the major outer planets it might get sent into an orbit that gets into the inner solar system. And if something that size hit Earth, it would be game over for life here -- the impact would vaporize much or all of the oceans. Even an impact by something the size of comet Hale-Bopp would destroy all higher life on the planet. The chance of impacts like this may have been underestimated because of anthropic selection -- if any had occurred in the past (say) 1 billion years then we would not be here.

mabbo 5y ago
It's expected orbit will take it around 54,600 AU from the Sun. The orbital period of something that far out is in the millions of years range. If it doesn't kill us this time, rest assured by the time it comes back we'll have done the job properly already.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  I'm more referring to objects of this kind, not this specific object. Threats from supercomets are not a new concern: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/448/1/27/990672 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/448/1/27/990672 "A 100 km comet striking the Earth would carry ∼1000 times the energy involved in the creation of the 150 km Chicxulub crater and would presumably remove the surface biosphere"
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I think people have suggested the dinosaur killing asteroid may have caused global fires and rain of molten rock, so that scale might be sufficient as far as humans are concerned.
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ankmTU89X_A - simulation of impact. Note scale - both size and time. Note rebound that briefly created one of largest peaks in Earths history. And curtain of ejecta. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di... (note: popscience and old! let me know if any here got disproved or there is more up to date material) Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere. Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling. The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt. Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil. Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

34679 5y ago

>almost undoubtedly the largest Oort Cloud object ever discovered- almost in dwarf planet territory! Not a dwarf planet.

ncmncm 5y ago
Thus, "almost". But big enough to be spherical. Or to eliminate multicellular life on Earth, if it hit us.
- djmips 5y ago
  C'mon maybe a few multicellular lifeforms would survive. What about everyone's favorite tardigrade?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Sure, but do they count? They would survive in the heart of a star.
- 34679 5y ago
  The headline does not contain "almost".

epaulson 5y ago

I went looking for a visualization of this orbit, and I found this tweet: https://twitter.com/rappolee/status/1406414441663528966 https://twitter.com/rappolee/status/1406414441663528966

mekkkkkk 5y ago

I know very little about the subject, but does this mean that there are planet-sized objects in orbit around the sun of which we are unaware of?

CapitalistCartr 5y ago
There definitely are. A major reason for "demoting" Pluto was there are more such Pluto-scale planets in the Kuiper belt. Maybe we will find one bigger than Pluto.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  Thanks! That's wild to me. All talk about exoplanets and other pop-sci headlines makes you think we would have our own backyard figured out. Then again, I suppose the vastness of space is vast even within our solar system.
  - joeyh 5y ago
    Big backyard.. The Oort cloud extends a sizable fraction of the distance to Alpha Centari. No spacecraft has reached it and very little is known. It's remarkable that this dwarf planet's orbit reaches it. Its aphelion is 54,600 AU, or 0.86 light years!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bnjemian 5y ago

I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.

lmilcin 5y ago
But why? Don't we already have a moon?
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Think of all of the opportunities to write software to calculate the complicated changes required for astrology.
- legostormtroopr 5y ago
  We have moon, but what about second moon?
  - throwaway378037 5y ago
    I don’t think he knows about second moon!
  - disillusioned 5y ago
    What if, and hear me out here, we give _our_ moon its _own_ moon? Like letting my dog have a lizard for a pet!
- rishav_sharan 5y ago
  It's like asking, why have 2nd breakfast when you had one breakfast. We must channel our inner hobbits and think big
Koshkin 5y ago
R-right... What can go wrong?
sneak 5y ago

designium 5y ago

swap dwarf planet for a neutron star and you have "Dragon's Egg" story.

kpozin 5y ago

Note that dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun at ~3 AU, is larger (⌀ = 939 km) than this one (⌀ = 100–200 km). There are ~25 other known asteroids with diameters over 200 km in the asteroid belt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#Largest_by_diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#...).

koheripbal 5y ago
Right, but the composition is likely very very different.
zksmk 5y ago
Right, but it's not the size that counts, it's the motion in the ocean. And what's on the inside. This little guy's from the Oort cloud. He's been places, he's seen things.

kumarvvr 5y ago

Ok. I got really excited by the title. But the diameter of the planet is about 130 km, so its tiny. Maybe "fat asteroid" is a better term than "dwarf planet" ?

yummybear 5y ago
I don't think we should be shaming asteroids in this way - how about "gravitationally challenged"?
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Sure. In that vein, "differently sized" should also be ok.

phy6 5y ago

Meme stock apes have claimed this as the new destination of their portfolios.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

How is it possible to have an orbit without the sun at the center?

ncmncm 5y ago
An elliptical orbit has, instead of a center, two foci, or focuses. In a very eccentric, or sharp and skinny, ellipse like this object's orbit, there is a focus very close to each pointy end. The sun is at one of these. (There is nothing at the other.) At the point of closest approach to the sun somewhere inside (the radius of) Saturn's orbit, it will be going twice as fast as Saturn, but at almost a right angle to it, swinging past the south pole of the sun, and will then shoot out to an immense distance, slowing all the way until it slows down enough to fall back in again for another go.

tigerlily 5y ago

groups.io I had never come across before. Praised be Mark Fletcher!

varjag 5y ago

In its apogee it is 0.85 light years away from the Sun.

andy_ppp 5y ago

Okay so if this was a direct hit, what would happen!? Would it just be a non event for the sun or could we expect higher temperatures on Earth or worse?

EdSchouten 5y ago
It's apparently pretty hard to hit the Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g (Though that video mostly talks about small objects like rockets. Maybe it's a different story for dwarf planets?) That said... Keep in mind that this is about a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun. It's 11 AU out, so twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter is.
- jhgb 5y ago
  More importantly the video mostly talks about hitting the Sun from a platform like Earth already closely orbiting the Sun, which is not the same thing as arriving practically from interstellar space. That's much more important than the size of anything. If you were to make a velocity change to this object in its aphelion to make it hit the Sun, it would be vastly easier (at least per unit of weight) than do the same with a probe launched from Earth.
hedshodd 5y ago
A direct hit with the sun? Maybe slightly higher temperatures if the "impact site" was facing us, but not for long because the sun is highly convective and each "longitudinal ring" on the sun rotates differentially, thus dissipating the effects of that impact very very quickly. A good chunk of it would also probably burn up before even reaching the Sun, but how much of it is hard to say. But keep in mind, it says "within 11 AU of the Sun", which is still beyond Saturn; Saturn's 9.5 AU away from the Sun, and Uranus is about 19 AU away from the Sun. So it's still pretty far away.

andy_ppp 5y ago

Suppose this, if there are advanced civilisations doing interstellar travel and there really is a 200km object that could hit Earth (I understand this is too far out), what would be the way to ask them for help?

napolux 5y ago
pray
subroutine 5y ago
Shoot a rocket into outer-space with a bunch of full human genomes (sequencing data), a backup of the internet, and a readme. The probability of a starship being within 5 lightyears of earth is likely zero. If there is one, it's probably because it's already on its way here.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  Who is to say we aren't the product of such a disaster...
  - subroutine 5y ago
    What do you mean "product"? Like... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
- blocked_again 5y ago
  This is under the assumption that advancee civilizations can travel only as fast as speed of light. There is also a possibility that there are advanced civilizations that jailbreaked the Universe/Reality and can be anywhere in seconds. Whether they give a shit about primitive civilizations like us who invented decent computers only like fifty years back is a different question altogether.
  - subroutine 5y ago

bencollier49 5y ago

If this is coming within range of the Oort cloud, ought we to be worried about being showered with perturbed meteors?

residualmind 5y ago

While scientifically-minded folks are excited for a new object of study, or simply something awesome in the night sky - I can't wait until I see the first doomsday predictions by people with a different mindset... In a way it is also an object of study for those world views ;)

AudreyDoka 5y ago

Pas mal.

AudreyDoka 5y ago

Pas mal mais je connais pas trop son rôle.

Rerarom 5y ago

First read this as "dwarf star" and was really excited

Flow 5y ago

Could Hubble and/or James Webb Telescope see this object with any clarity or is it too near?

hasmanean 5y ago

Hang a giant sign on it saying “Dantooine or bust.”