In mid July, NASA’s New Horizons probe made its flyby of Pluto following its years-long approach, and collected a lot of amazing data–some of which is still being transmitted–to further our scientific advance and our understanding of the outer reaches of our solar system. But Pluto was only one of the sights in the New Horizons mission. Now NASA’s probe hurdles past Pluto in order to explore what lies beyond it in the Kuiper Belt.
BEYOND PLUTO
A recent Washington Post article detailed what New Horizons might discover next. According to the Scott Sheppard, an astronomer of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, astronomers have detected 1,500 icy bodies past Pluto, and many of these bodies could be potential planets. Most of them will probably be nothing more than floating chunks of ice and rock, but some could potentially be “dwarf planets” like Pluto. However, Sheppard also speculates that there could be something the size of Neptune lurking about, just outside of field of vision.
FOLLOW THE NEW HORIZONS MISSION HERE
“I think there are definitely things out there bigger than Pluto that are yet to be discovered,” Sheppard told the Washington Post.
BEYOND THE KUIPER BELT
Back in 2014, Sheppard and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii published a paper together in Nature. Their research tells the story of a potential planet similar to the size of Neptune lurking out there in deep space.
The first sign of this potential planet X came with the discovery of a dwarf planet named 2012 VP113. It’s three times as far from the sun as Pluto, and actually exists beyond the Kuiper Belt. Sheppard and Trujillo noticed that VP113 seemed to share an orbital angle with other very large objects.
What makes this interesting is a concept called the “argument of perihelion.” Perihelion is when an object reaches its closest point to the sun in its orbit. In simpler terms, VP113 and its orbiting buddies are having their orbits manipulated into specific patterns by a “great disturber.” This massive object is affecting VP113’s orbit patterns which happen to avoid being hit by the dwarf planet the same way near earth asteroids have orbital patterns happen to avoid hitting Earth. But think about asteroids relative to the size of Earth. How big would an object have to be to manipulate the orbital patterns of a dwarf planet? More enticing is the question of how could there be such a massive object so far away from the Sun?
There are several hypotheses out there, but nothing conclusive. After all, Sheppard and Trujillo’s findings are by no means conclusive. But it is a great mystery and further attributes to the idea that there is still much to be discovered in our great big backyard that lies beyond Pluto.
