• Planeta Enano 2012 Vp113
• Vp 113

Scott S. Sheppard/Carnegie Institution for Science

2012 VP113 live position and data This page shows Asteroid 2012 VP113 location and other relevant astronomical data in real time. The celestial coordinates, magnitude, distances and speed are updated in real time and are computed using high quality data sets provided by the JPL Horizons ephemeris service (see acknowledgements for details). The orbits of Sedna (orange) and dwarf planet 2012 VP 113 (red). Also shown are the orbits of the giant planets (purple). The Kuiper belt is the dotted light blue region.

This orbit diagram shows the paths of Oort cloud objects 2012 VP₁₁₃ (red) and Sedna (orange), which circle the Kuiper belt (blue) at the Solar System's edge.

The Solar System just got a lot more far-flung. Astronomers have discovered¹ a probable dwarf planet that orbits the Sun far beyond Pluto, in the most distant trajectory known.

Together with Sedna, a similar extreme object discovered a decade ago², the find is reshaping ideas about how the Solar System came to be. “It goes to show that there’s something we don’t know about our Solar System, and it’s something important,” says co-discoverer Chad Trujillo, an astronomer at Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii. “We’re starting to get a taste of what’s out beyond what we consider the edge.”

Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, report the finding today in Nature.

“This is a great discovery,” says Michael Brown, a planetary astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We’ve been searching for more objects like Sedna for more than 10 years now.” Finding another one like it reduces the chances that Sedna is a fluke, he says. But astronomers now have to come up with ideas to explain how these objects remain tightly gravitationally bound to the Sun when they orbit so far away.

The newfound object's official name is 2012 VP₁₁₃, but the discovery team calls it VP for short, or just 'Biden' — after US Vice-President Joe Biden. In several years time, after observations have pinned down its orbit, the scientists will submit a name for consideration by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization in charge of celestial nomenclature.

Nature Podcast

Kerri Smith talks to Chad Trujillo about the newly discovered orb.

Bleeding edge

The classical planetary portion of the Solar System ends at Neptune, which orbits the Sun at about 30 times the Earth–Sun distance, a cosmic yardstick known as an astronomical unit (AU). One AU is approximately 150 million kilometres. Beyond Neptune is a realm of icy bodies, known as the Kuiper belt, that includes Pluto. This region stretches from roughly 30 to 50 AU. And beyond that lies the Oort cloud, with Sedna at its inner edge and comets farther out.

Sedna never gets any closer to the Sun than 76 AU. 2012 VP₁₁₃, although still in the inner Oort cloud, is even more remote: at its closest, it is 80 AU away.

Scott S. Sheppard/Carnegie Institution for Science

The red, green and blue dots show the movement of 2012 VP₁₁₃ over a period of several hours on 5 November 2012.

Planeta Enano 2012 Vp113

The body is so distant that when Sheppard first spotted it, it was the slowest-moving astronomical object he had ever seen. The farther away something is, the slower it seems to move across the sky. Trujillo and Sheppard have been hunting for distant objects with the Dark Energy Camera, a 520-megapixel camera on the 4-metre Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. They captured 2012 VP₁₁₃ during their first observing run, in November 2012, on the fifth image of the hundreds they would eventually snap. “We got lucky right away,” says Sheppard.

For months they tracked the object, until its full orbit became more apparent. But whereas Sedna can stray as far as 1,000 AU from the Sun, 2012 VP₁₁₃ gets no further than about 452 AU. It seems to be more closely bound by the Sun’s gravity, which is something of a mystery, says Sheppard.

Origin stories

At 450 kilometres across, 2012 VP₁₁₃ is about half the size of Sedna. If, as scientists expect, it is made mostly of ice, then its gravity probably pulls it into a spherical shape. This would qualify it as a dwarf planet under the revised rules of planethood drawn up by the IAU in 2006.

There are several competing ideas for how objects such as Sedna and 2012 VP₁₁₃ got to where they are today. One leading hypothesis proposes that in the Solar System’s infancy, a nearby star gravitationally perturbed the coalescing system and dragged some fragments out towards the edge. Another possibility is that a massive rogue planet passed through at some point, kicking objects from the Kuiper belt outwards into the inner Oort cloud.

Either way, Sedna and 2012 VP₁₁₃ may be just the tip of the iceberg, says Megan Schwamb, an astronomer at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. She has looked for Sedna-like objects before³, and has modelled how much material could be out there. The inner Oort cloud could contain some 10–100 times the mass of the Kuiper belt, she says.

Trujillo and Sheppard estimate that there are hundreds more inner Oort objects waiting to be found. They are currently tracking six more candidates that could belong to extreme parts of the Solar System.

Scientists using ground based observatories have discovered an object that is believed to have the most distant orbit found beyond the known edge of our solar system. Named 2012 VP113, the observations of the object — possibly a dwarf planet — were obtained and analyzed with a grant from NASA. A dwarf planet is an object in orbit around the sun that is large enough to have its own gravity pull itself into a spherical, or nearly round, shape.
The detailed findings are published in the March 27 edition of Nature.

These images show the discovery of 2012 VP113 taken about 2 hours apart on Nov. 5, 2012. The motion of 2012 VP113 stands out compared to the steady state background of stars and galaxies.
Image Credit: Scott Sheppard/Carnegie Institution for Science

The observations and analysis were led and coordinated by Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. They used the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s 13-foot (4-meter) telescope in Chile to discover 2012 VP113. The telescope is operated by the Foundation of Universities for Research in Astronomy, under contract with the National Science Foundation. The Magellan 21-foot (6.5-meter) telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile was used to determine the orbit of 2012 VP113 and obtain detailed information about its surface properties.

“The discovery of 2012 VP113 shows us that the outer reaches of our solar system are not an empty wasteland as once was thought,” said Trujillo, lead author and astronomer. “Instead, this is just the tip of the iceberg telling us that there are many inner Oort Cloud bodies awaiting discovery. It also illustrates how little we know about the most distant parts of our solar system and how much there is left to explore.”

Our known solar system consists of the rocky planets like Earth, which are close to the sun; the gas giant planets, which are further out; and the frozen objects of the Kuiper belt, which lie just beyond Neptune’s orbit. Beyond this, there appears to be an edge to the solar system where only one object somewhat smaller than Pluto, Sedna, was previously known to inhabit for its entire orbit. But the newly found 2012 VP113 has an orbit that stays even beyond Sedna, making it the furthest known in the solar system.

Sedna was discovered beyond the Kuiper Belt edge in 2003, and it was not known if Sedna was unique, as Pluto once was thought to be before the Kuiper Belt was discovered in 1992. With the discovery of 2012 VP113, Sedna is not unique, and 2012 VP113 is likely the second known member of the hypothesized inner Oort cloud. The outer Oort cloud is the likely origin of some comets.

“The search for these distant inner Oort cloud objects beyond Sedna and 2012 VP113 should continue, as they could tell us a lot about how our solar system formed and evolved,” says Sheppard.

Sheppard and Trujillo determine that about 900 objects with orbits like Sedna and 2012 VP113 with sizes larger than 621 miles (1000 km) may exist. 2012 VP113 is likely one of hundreds of thousands of distant objects that inhabit the region in our solar system scientists refer to as the inner Oort cloud. The total population of the inner Oort cloud is likely bigger than that of the Kuiper Belt and main asteroid belt.

“Some of these inner Oort cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth,” said Sheppard. This is because many of the inner Oort cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology.”

2012 VP113’s closest orbit point to the sun brings it to about 80 times the distance of the Earth from the sun, a measurement referred to as an astronomical unit or AU. The rocky planets and asteroids exist at distances ranging between .39 and 4.2 AU. Gas giants are found between 5 and 30 AU, and the Kuiper belt (composed of hundreds of thousands of icy objects, including Pluto) ranges from 30 to 50 AU. In our solar system there is a distinct edge at 50 AU. Until 2012 VP113 was discovered, only Sedna, with a closest approach to the Sun of 76 AU, was known to stay significantly beyond this outer boundary for its entire orbit.

Vp 113

Both Sedna and 2012 VP113 were found near their closest approach to the sun, but they both have orbits that go out to hundreds of AU, at which point they would be too faint to discover. The similarity in the orbits found for Sedna, 2012 VP113 and a few other objects near the edge of the Kuiper Belt suggests the new object’s orbit might be influenced by the potential presence of a yet unseen planet perhaps up to 10 times the size of Earth. Further studies of this deep space arena will continue.

Figure 2: a) Orbit diagram for the outer solar system. The Sun and Terrestrial planets are at the center. The orbits of the four giant planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are shown by purple solid circles. The Kuiper Belt (including Pluto) is shown by the dotted light blue region just beyond the giant planets. Sedna’s orbit is shown in orange while 2012 VP113’s orbit is shown in red. Both objects are currently near their closest approach to the Sun (perihelion). They would be too faint to detect when in the outer parts of their orbits. Notice that both orbits have similar perihelion locations on the sky and both are far away from the giant planet and Kuiper Belt regions. b) Plot of all the known bodies in the outer solar system with their closest approach to the Sun (Perihelion) and eccentricity.

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