Meet The New Members Of Our Solar System

Meet The New Members Of Our Solar System


Remember the days when we thought our solar system had nine planets and a smattering of asteroids? Pluto may no longer be considered a planet, but our cosmic family has grown significantly this month – from alien asteroids to hundreds of more Pluto-like minor planets to, maybe, evidence for a Planet Number 9 that would be unlike any other known planet in our solar system. Each of these discoveries makes a more detailed family tree, and help us understand where we, as a solar system, came from.

A Host of Interstellar Visitors That Decided To Stay


In 2017, a strange, elongated object sailed through our solar system. Unlike any object that we saw before, some hypothesized it was a piece of an alien spaceship. While it may not be piloted by little green men, the asteroid Oumuamua was a visitor from outside our solar system, with a hyperbolic orbit that took it on a tour of the inner solar system and back out again. Astronomers asked – was Oumuamua  the only interstellar visitor our solar system has seen?
But only two years later, astronomers detected another visitor from another solar system. Comet 2I/Borisov streaked through our solar system. As it whizzed away from the sun, astronomers were able to get a good look at its coma (a hazy cloud surrounding a comet) with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. To their surprise, 2I/Borisov contained a large amount of carbon monoxide, more than comets that were born here. That level of carbon monoxide may tell a tale of its birthplace – much colder than the nursery of our own solar system.
This week, research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society tells of 19 more interstellar asteroids that have been hanging around our solar system for billions of years. Between Jupiter and Neptune, these asteroids have orbits perpendicular to the other planets and asteroids in our solar system, one indication that they are not from around here. It’s likely that they were pulled from a neighboring solar system when the sun was just forming, when the Sun was born in an interstellar nursery along with many other stars.
of clusters of galaxies. The researchers repurposed a set of images taken over time, originally meant to look at supernovae and galaxies, and looked for tiny objects moving in the foreground, objects that are part of our solar system.
But what else is lurking out there?
There is a group of Trans-Neptunian Objects with strange, clustered orbits. One idea is that these objects are “herded” by another planet out there – Planet Nine. This planet may be 400 times farther out from the sun than the Earth is, and could be about 15 times larger than Earth. That puts it in the middle ground between Earth and Neptune – a space no planet in our solar system yet inhabits.
Does this planet exist? Well, that’s hard to tell with existing data, but the more objects we find in the Kuiper Belt, the closer we will come in knowing the truth. The recently discovered minor planets prove that this method of finding new objects is highly successful. The more minor planets we find, the easier it will be to predict if other, larger objects exist too.

Our Celestial Family

It’s our local corner of the universe, yet there’s still a lot we don’t know about it.
With all of these new objects, astronomers are getting closer to understanding where we came from. They are getting a clearer idea of what the sun’s cosmic nursery looked like when it formed, billions of years ago, and what its stellar siblings were like.
We’re getting a clearer idea of the conditions of the outer reaches of our solar system. How does extreme distance from our sun affect those cold worlds? What are they made of? How many of them are there? And what is a hypothetical Planet Nine really like?
These new members of our cosmic family may be tiny, but they can offer up clues to our origins and our place within the cosmos.

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