Meet Farout, the newest and farthest member of the solar system

Everyone is acquainted with the traditional model of our solar system, with the Sun at the center and planets revolving around it. This perception of our solar system has existed for decades and has been taught in school all over the world. But the last couple of decades have revealed what astronomers had suspected for a long time, the existence for planets beyond the orbit of Pluto. In 2003, astronomers discovered Sedna and Eris, which are at a distance of 76 AU and 96 AU respectively (AU stands for Astronomical Unit, i.e. the distance between the sun and earth, approximately 93 million miles). Eris held the record of being the farthest dwarf planet ever discovered. However, that title has now gone to Farout (or 2018 VG18 as per nomenclature).

Farout orbits the sun at a distance that is approximately four times farther than the distance between the sun and Pluto. David Tholen, a scientist at the University of Hawaii helped discover Farout. He and his team measured the speed at what it moves in the sky and were able to figure out that it was about 120 AU away from the sun and required well over 1000 years to complete one revolution around the sun.

It is a long-standing theory that there exists a massive shell of objects at the farthest reaches of the sun’s influence, and one of them wanders into the solar system from time to time. Moreover, many of the world’s leading astronomers strongly believe that there exists a large planet much farther away from Farout, given the fact that the orbits of dwarf trans-Neptune planets experience anomalies, most probably due to unknown gravitational influence.