Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866917250001272832 |
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| author | Cheng, Sihao Li, Jiaxuan Yang, Eritas |
| author_facet | Cheng, Sihao Li, Jiaxuan Yang, Eritas |
| contents | We report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate, 2017 OF201, currently located at a distance of 90 au. Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with a semi-major axis of 830 au and a perihelion of 45 au, precisely determined from 24 observations over 20 years. Assuming a typical albedo of 0.13, we estimate a diameter about 700 km, making it the second-largest known object in this dynamical population and a dwarf planet candidate with the widest orbit. Its high eccentricity suggests that an unseen population of similar objects would total about 1% of Earth's mass. Notably, the longitude of perihelion of 2017 OF201 lies outside the clustering observed in extreme trans-Neptunian objects, posing a challenge to the proposed dynamical evidence for the hypothetical Planet Nine. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15806 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201 Cheng, Sihao Li, Jiaxuan Yang, Eritas Earth and Planetary Astrophysics We report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate, 2017 OF201, currently located at a distance of 90 au. Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with a semi-major axis of 830 au and a perihelion of 45 au, precisely determined from 24 observations over 20 years. Assuming a typical albedo of 0.13, we estimate a diameter about 700 km, making it the second-largest known object in this dynamical population and a dwarf planet candidate with the widest orbit. Its high eccentricity suggests that an unseen population of similar objects would total about 1% of Earth's mass. Notably, the longitude of perihelion of 2017 OF201 lies outside the clustering observed in extreme trans-Neptunian objects, posing a challenge to the proposed dynamical evidence for the hypothetical Planet Nine. |
| title | Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201 |
| topic | Earth and Planetary Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806 |