Originally published February 16 2006
Astronomers puzzled by newly discovered deep space object
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS) has discovered a deep space object it has nicknamed "Buffy" in the Kuiper Belt.
Astronomers working in Canada, France and the United States said they had found a small deep-space object, nicknamed Buffy, that challenges mainstream theories about the evolution of the Solar System.
The rock lies in the Kuiper Belt, the name for the flock of objects beyond Neptune's orbit that are believed to be leftover rubble from the Solar System's building phase and are the source for many comets, the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS) said.
Measuring between 500 and 1,000 kilometers (300 to 600 miles) across and taking about 440 years to make just one circuit of the Sun, Buffy is remarkable not for its size -- around half a dozen identified Kuiper Belt objects are bigger -- but for its location and orbital tilt.
"(...) This new discovery is exciting because it causes us to rethink our understanding about how the Kuiper Belt formed."
Buffy has an almost perfect circular orbit and encircles the Sun at an extreme tilt, at 47 degrees to the orbital plane of the planets as they swing around the Sun.
The theory is that, billions of years ago, this remote community of rocks, the so-called "extended scattered disk" of the Kuiper Belt, got their extremely eccentric orbits because of a passing star.
It eventually migrated outwards, causing at least some members of the Belt's "extended scattered disk" to develop more circular and tilted orbits, they speculate.
Its orbit is in a relatively narrow range of between 52 and and 62 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun (an AU is a standard measurement, being that of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, of approximately 150 million kilometers, or 93 million miles).
By comparison, another "extended scattered disk" member called Sedna swings out to as far as 900 AU before coming as close to the Sun as 76 AU.
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