New research has shown that the “Altjira system” of Kuiper Belt objects consists of three separate bodies that orbit each other, making the system a robust example of the three-body problem. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI))
Astronomers may have just found a rare example of the “three-body problem” hiding in plain sight behind the solar system’s outermost planet. If the observations are confirmed, it would indicate that many more cosmic triplets could be lurking in the distant reaches of our cosmic neighborhood, researchers report.
In 2001, astronomers spotted what they thought was a binary system consisting of two large bodies orbiting each other about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets, including Pluto, located beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The two icy rocks, collectively known as 148780 Altjira, are about 4,700 miles (7,600 km) apart, or about one-fiftieth the distance between Earth and the moon. (The system is named after the creator deity of the Australian Aboriginal Arrernte people.)
However, in a new study published March 4 in The Planetary Science Journal, scientists suggest that the inner body in the Altira system is actually a pair of smaller objects that orbit very close to each other, making the system a triple.
The research team came to this conclusion by combining images from the Hubble Space Telescope with 17 years of data collected by the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. This revealed slight shifts in the outer body's trajectory, indicating that it is being gravitationally pulled by two objects rather than one. However, the system is too far away to visually confirm separation of the inner bodies.
There are dozens of possible configurations for three-particle systems. However, there is no single solution to the “problem,” the researchers say.
“The triple system came out on top [when comparing different modeling scenarios],” lead study author Maya Nelsen, an astronomer at Brigham Young University in Utah, said in a NASA statement. However, it’s also possible that the inner body could be a “contact binary” — two objects that touch each other and act as a single entity — or “something that’s actually very flat, like a pancake,” she added.
The researchers note that over the next 10 years, the Altjira system will
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