Huge Oort Cloud object has been spotted entering the outer solar system – Physics World

Astronomers sifting through data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) have spotted a large Oort Cloud object approaching the outer regions of the solar system.

The discovery has caused ripples of excitement within the planetary science community because of the object’s unusually large size – initial estimates suggest it may be as big as 130–160 km across, substantially bigger than some of the largest comets. Studying the object could also give researchers insights into an enigmatic process in the solar system.

Catalogued as C/2014 UN271, the wandering visitor was found in archival data captured by the DES project, which investigates the cosmological mystery of dark energy by photographing distant galaxies.

“The object appears in about thirty images out of the [approximately] 80,000 that were taken over six years for the survey,” Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-discovered C/2014 UN271 along with PhD student Pedro Bernardinelli, tells Physics World. “Pedro instantly recognized it as being of special interest because of its nearly-escaping orbit and the great distance at which it was first seen,” he adds.

C/2014 UN271 seems to have come from a region some 10,000–20,000 times farther from the Sun than Earth. This is within the Oort Cloud – an immense shell of icy objects thought to envelop the entire solar system. On its current trajectory, the object takes nearly 5.5 million years to complete just one loop of its orbit.

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