Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid

By M. Brown, C. Trujillo, D. Rabinowitz. 2004

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the discovery of the minor planet (90377) Sedna, the most distant object ever seen in the solar system. Prediscovery images from 2001, 2002, and 2003 have allowed us to refine the orbit sufficiently to conclude that Sedna is on a highly eccentric orbit that permanently resides well beyond the Kuiper Belt with a semimajor axis of 480 ± 40 AU and a perihelion of 76 ± 4 AU. Such an orbit is unexpected in our current understanding of the solar system but could be the result of scattering by a yet-to-be-discovered planet, perturbation by an anomalously close stellar encounter, or formation of the solar system within a cluster of stars. In all of these cases a significant additional population is likely present, and in the two most likely cases Sedna is best considered a member of the inner Oort Cloud, which then extends to much smaller semimajor axes than previously expected. Continued discovery and orbital characterization of objects in this inner Oort Cloud will verify the genesis of this unexpected population.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7a464fee3f63e8441b945c7f17e6a791b43549c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Morbidelli
2. N. Evans II
3. Jenny E. Greene
4. B. Peterson
5. T. Treu
6. D. Nesvorný
7. P. Myers
8. Luis C. Ho

In Instrumentation

1. Jenny E. Greene
2. N. Evans II
3. B. Peterson
4. J. Woo
5. T. Treu
6. M. Malkan
7. A. Barth
8. A. Morbidelli

Citations in the corpus

• The Birth Environment of the Solar System (2010, background): “The two dashed curves show the probability that the solar nebula experiences an encounter close enough to explain Sedna (b ∼ 400 AU) and does not experience an encounter so close that the orbital elements of the planets are significantly changed (b ∼ 225 AU).”
• THE SPITZER c2d LEGACY RESULTS: STAR-FORMATION RATES AND EFFICIENCIES; EVOLUTION AND LIFETIMES (2008, background): “Both the abrupt truncation of the Kuiper Belt near 50 AU and the orbits of detached Kuiper Belt objects such as Sedna are likely the result of stellar encounters within the first few million years of solar system history (Brown et al. 2004; Kenyon & Bromley 2004).”
• THE LOW-LUMINOSITY END OF THE RADIUS–LUMINOSITY RELATIONSHIP FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2013, background): “…reverberation mapping substitutes high temporal resolution for high spatial resolution, allowing us to probe regions of gas that are only ∼0.01 pc in extent (com parable to the inner region of the Oort Cloud in our own solar system; Brown et al. 2004) in the centers of arbitrarily distant galaxies.”
• EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM (2016, background): “In particular, the long-term modulation of scattered KBO eccentricities provides a natural explanation for the existence of the so-called distant detached objects such as Sedna and 2012 VP113 (Brown et al. 2004; Trujillo & Sheppard 2014).”
• Building the terrestrial planets: Constrained accretion in the inner Solar System (2009, background): “However, if the giant planets finished migrating, and therefore finished clearing the planetesimal disk, within a few Myr, then the Solar System should have either an Oort cloud or Sedna, but not both.”
• Neptune’s Migration into a Stirred-Up Kuiper Belt: A Detailed Comparison of Simulations to Observations (2005, background): “However there are two exceptions to this rule, namely, 2000 CR105 and 2003 VB12 (also known as Sedna) which have respective perihelia of q = 44.14± 0.02 (Gladman et al. 2002) and q = 76± 4 AU (Brown et al. 2004).”
• The planet nine hypothesis (2019, background): “In the presence of Planet Nine, however, the orbits of 2013 RF98 and and 2014 FE72 are significantly stabilized, so that its longterm evolution is characterized by apsidal confinement akin to that exhibited by objects like Sedna, 2012 VP113, and others.”
• The Size Distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects (2004, background): “…energy per unit mass, given by the initial relative velocities of the two bodies, V 2ij ¼ h 2 i þ v 2 i þ h 2 j þ v 2 j ; ðA4Þ 1 The discovery of Sedna (Brown et al. 2004) tests models for KBO formation at 50–100 AU. where h and v are the horizontal and vertical components of the velocity…”
• Photometric Observations Constraining the Size, Shape, and Albedo of 2003 EL61, a Rapidly Rotating, Pluto-sized Object in the Kuiper Belt (2005, background): “The magnitudes we report here for 2003 EL61 are scaled so that the mean Palomar and Tenagra magnitudes roughly match the mean V-band measurement from the SMARTS observations.”
• Discovery of a Planetary-sized Object in the Scattered Kuiper Belt (2005, background): “In the two years worth of slow data examined to date we have found only two real objects: Sedna (previously also found in the fast scheme) and 2003 UB313.”
• Embedded star clusters and the formation of the Oort Cloud (2006, background): “Very recently, two members of the IOC’s population may have been found: the unusual body (90377) Sedna (Brown et al., 2004) is thought to be a member of the IOC (see, e.g., Morbidelli and Levison, 2004), and perhaps so is the object 2000 CR105.”