Mysterious New Trans-Neptunian Object Could Help Search for Planet Nine, Astronomers Say

Astronomers in the Vatican have discovered a new trans-Neptunian object that could help search for Planet Nine in the Solar System. This mysterious object is called 2021 XD7 that takes about 286 years to complete one revolution around the Sun. Astronomers said it was smaller than Pluto, which was demoted several years ago to a dwarf planet.

Trans-Neptunian object 2021 XD7 has a strange orbit that is considerably more tilted than other planets, making its closest distance to the Sun still 30 times farther than Earth.

Vatican Astronomer Discovered a New Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO)

Fr. Richard Boyle, S.J., an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, and colleagues have found a new member of the Solar System orbiting beyond Neptune. Online Catholic news and information website Aleteia reported that Fr. Boyle discovered the mysterious object on December 3, 2021, using the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT).

The VATT is a moderate-sized telescope and is the first telescope built using ground-breaking methods at the University of Arizona during the 1990s under Pope St. John Paul II. Fr. Boyle was using the VATT4K lens, specially designed for photometric surveys and faint objects when he found the TNO 2021 XD7. It works similarly to the phone cameras but was optimized to achieve a high level of sensitivity.

Kazimieras Černi, a Lithuanian astronomer and astrophysicist, analyzed the data from the VATT, while Peter Veres from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center was the one who calculated the orbit of the new TNO using observations that Boyle and his colleague acquired over time.

Since TNO 2021 XD7 lies far away from the Sun, little is known about it aside from its size being smaller than Pluto, which also means it is way smaller than the Earth's Moon.

TNO 2021 XD7 Could Help Search for Planet Nine

In 2015, the idea of Planet Nine was first proposed by Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin when they said that they found evidence of a giant planet beyond Neptune's orbit. The Independent reported that the evidence the astronomers referred to were the orbits of five smaller objects in the same region.

But it has been challenging to pinpoint the location of the object accurately. Other astronomers have claimed no evidence of such a planet in the outer Solar System. Instead, they think that it was just simply confirmation bias that was discovered because that is where the telescopes were pointed at the time.

The discovery of TNO 2021 XD7 gives astronomers hope that they could finally find Planet Nine, which they have been looking for years. They believe that studying the new TNO could help them pinpoint the exact location of the ninth planet in the Solar System.

The First Trans-Neptunian Object Discovered

TNOs are planets that orbit the Sun at a distance of over 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers). According to the online science communication magazine Capeia, the first TNO discovered was Pluto in 1930.

During the early 1900s, astronomers believed that there was a discrepancy in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. They think it was because of another undiscovered distant object within the Solar System. Finally, their search for this object led them to the discovery of Pluto, which was first declared as a planet but was demoted in 2006 as a dwarf planet.

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