Ammonite' Is In Solar System

Reference: Visit website

Nicknamed Ammonite — a kind of fossil — the sednoid discovery 2023 KQ14 is forcing astronomers to rethink theories about how the solar system formed.

Here's everything you need to know about where Ammonite is and how it fits into the pantheon of the solar system.

It may be an exciting find, but Ammonite is not a bright, easy-to-find object. Unlike distant exoplanets, most of which are seen when they transit their star, a relatively small object in the outer solar system that reflects very little sunlight is dim. So, so dim. It's comparable to a magnitude 24 object, which is impossible to see with all but the most powerful professional telescopes' wide-field imaging cameras.

Which is precisely what happened earlier this month. Ammonite was detected — as a faint dot in long-exposure images — from near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island, first by Japanese astronomers using the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam in Hawaii, then with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope's MegaCam to map its orbit.

Ammonite was first detected about 71 astronomical units (an AU is the average distance between Earth and the sun — 93 million miles/150 million kilometers) from the sun, from where it may take as long as 10,000 years to complete one orbit of the sun. This region lies beyond the Kuiper Belt and may be located within the area considered to transition into the inner Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a sphere around the solar system that's thought to be home to billions of objects, including comets.

As well as being a TNO, Ammonite is a sednoid — and only the fourth ever discovered. The archetype is Sedna, a dwarf planet with a diameter of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), whose elliptical orbit takes it within 76 au, but as far as 937 au. For context, Neptune orbits 30 au from the sun and Pluto between 30 and 50 au.

There are two other sednoids. 2012 VP113, found in 2012 and nicknamed ⁘Biden⁘ for its ⁘VP⁘ abbreviation, is 280 miles (450 kilometers)