A newly discovered "minor planet" with an elongated orbit around the Sun may help explain the origin of comets, researchers said on Monday. The object, known as 2006 SQ372, is starting the outward portion of a 22,500-year orbit that will take it 150 billion miles away from the Sun. The icy lump of rock is just over 2 billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune, researchers told a symposium on Monday. They will publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
Title: 2006 SQ372: A Likely Long-Period Comet from the Inner Oort Cloud Authors: Nathan A. Kaib, Andrew C. Becker, R. Lynne Jones, Andrew W. Puckett, Dmitry Bizyaev, Benjamin Dilday, Joshua A. Frieman, Daniel J. Oravetz, Kaike Pan, Thomas Quinn, Donald P. Schneider, Shannon Watters
We report the discovery of a minor planet (2006 SQ372) on an orbit with a perihelion of 24 AU and a semimajor axis of 796 AU. Dynamical simulations show that this is a transient orbit and is unstable on a timescale of 200 Myrs. Falling near the upper semimajor axis range of the scattered disk and the lower semimajor axis range of the Oort Cloud, previous membership in either class is possible. By modelling the production of similar orbits from the Oort Cloud as well as from the scattered disk, we find that the Oort Cloud produces 16 times as many objects on SQ372-like orbits as the scattered disk. Given this result, we believe this to be the most distant long-period comet ever discovered. Furthermore, our simulation results also indicate that 2000 OO67 has had a similar dynamical history. Unaffected by the "Jupiter-Saturn Barrier," these two objects are most likely long-period comets from the inner Oort Cloud.
Astronomers looking through the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the world's largest survey of galaxies, have found a new haul of objects closer to home - including one with a potentially exotic origin. By searching through a survey region known as Stripe 82, a team led by Dr Andrew Becker of the University of Washington, has discovered almost 50 new asteroid-sized bodies in the outer regions of our Solar System.
Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers detected a small, comet-like object called 2006 SQ372, which is likely made of rock and ice. However, its orbit never brings it close enough to the sun for it to develop a tail. Its unusual orbit is an ellipse that is four times longer than it is wide
The roughly 40-kilometer-wide object, dubbed 2006 SQ372, may be the first known visitor to the planetary neighbourhood that still makes return trips home to the remote Oort Cloud. This cloud is a proposed reservoir of long-period comets those that visit the inner solar system no more than once every 200 years and was first hypothesised to exist in 1950. It is likely thousands of times more distant from the sun than is Earth.
According to a report released today by a team led by Andrew Becker of the University of Washington, an Oort Cloud object named 2006 SQ372 has been detected a little over three billion kilometres from Earth, a bit closer to us than Neptune.