Because of this they decided to just stay at home and just go through some additional data to their surprise they discovered something even farther the far far out the object was a few astronomical units farther away than far out and this was of course an extremely lucky discovery but it of course also shocked the scientists and so it took about three years to finally confirm the distance to this object and to finally confirm what it probably is the object currently designated as 2018 AG-37 is roughly around 133 astronomical units away from the sun which is about four times the distance of Pluto to the sun.
But interestingly unlike some of the other so-called trans-Neptunian objects this one has a very peculiar orbit its lower point its so-called periapsis ends up crossing Neptune's orbit pretty much every 1000 years or so in other words it comes to within about 29 astronomical units away from the sun and that's something we kind of have never really seen before but would also explain why it has such an eccentric orbit and why it's so far away from everything it most likely was in orbit of Neptune at some point or possibly was some sort of a larger object passing nearby and it essentially got kicked out by Neptune when sometime in the past possibly billions and billions of years ago it probably passed relatively close to Neptune, with its orbit shifting dramatically and getting this very very eccentric orbit that it has today now this also means that at some point very likely in the next few billions of years or possibly even sooner than that it's going to come close to Neptune once again close enough to have its orbit changed and this might mean that it could get kicked out of the solar system or it could end up getting closer to the solar system or possibly even become a new satellite or a new moon of Neptune this is what we believed happened to the nature's moon known as triton today we believe that triton was very likely captured in a very similar fashion and though we know very little about triton itself other than the pictures that were taken by the Voyager 2 probe.
Today, we understand that triton very likely is one of these captured trans-Neptunian objects which naturally also raises the question of are these objects related did they originally come from the same larger body or are they just two different objects that experience the same fate or somewhat similar fates one of them became the moon but the other actually got kicked out to some extent and acquired a very eccentric orbit there's also a major difference between them and the difference is of course the size and the mass here's how triton compares to our own moon but here's how triton compares to this newly discovered object far far out. This is only about 400 kilometers in diameter in other words this is probably not even a dwarf planet.
In some sense this is a minor planet or a very large asteroid but depending on its composition it's most likely not even spherical probably resembling something like vesta which is larger in size than this particular object as well but why did it take scientists so long basically several years to confirm the existence and the distance to this object well it's really because of the distances involved here and also because of how slowly it moves across the night skies compared to everything else we have it took several years of observations including telescopes in Hawaii and in Chile.
Because it looks so tiny and so dim from the distance from planet earth and also because it moves so little across the night skies equivalent to an angle of about 4 seconds per day it means that a lot of observations and a lot of really accurate observations specifically nine separate observations were required to find out what the orbit here is also establishing that in the next few hundreds of years is going to reach the farthest point of the orbit that's going to be about 175 astronomical units but it's also important to understand that this object is not actually unique we've discovered many such objects with very similar elliptical orbits.
Many of which do actually cross Neptune as well but the more interesting types of objects are the so-called sednoids or sedan-like objects whose orbits don't necessarily reach Neptune but whose orbits are nevertheless elliptical as well and these are the objects the scientists are currently trying to collect in order to try to find out if there is another planet such as planet nine hiding somewhere on the outskirts of the solar system also sadness currently is in its closer part of the orbit the orbit of sedan for example is about 10000 years long or about 10 times as long which means that it's going to reach much farther distances from the sun the current estimate puts the farthest point at 937 astronomical units and that's basically nine times as far away as the recently discovered far far out but at this point in 2021 this is still a record holder this is still the farthest object that we currently can see with telescopes it is however not the farthest object that we are aware of for example there are several comets that we know exists when we've seen them in the past and we know their distances are now much farther away not to mention three different spacecrafts from NASA that have reached these far distances as well and so we know of Satna is currently right here this is the far out object I mentioned in the beginning and this is the newly confirmed far far out. Now the pioneer probe is at a distance of about 128 astronomical units which is somewhere right here with the voyager 2 being at 127 which is somewhere right before it but the current distance of voyager 1 is 152 astronomical units so it's already farther away we can't really see it but we can still hear it communicate with us and then we have the famous great comet of 1680. This is the comment whose orbit was calculated quite precisely and with an orbit of about 10400 years it's currently somewhere around 258 astronomical units away from planet Earth.
So that's roughly the double the distance of far far out and lastly one of the most famous comments historically the Caesars comet also known as the star of Caesar that surprisingly occurred right after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 bc is estimated to be at a distance of about 800 astronomical units away from Earth but that's of course a somewhat inaccurate estimate because back then no one really precisely measured orbits of these objects and so for now we can't really be certain what happened to this comet and where it currently is what we can be certain about though is the distance to far far out and its current orbital parameters obviously in the future more objects similar to this will be discovered and a lot more objects will be identified with even more eccentric and possibly even more unusual orbits.
For now though this is probably the most curious object we've found so far and the one that could help us understand how objects around Neptune interact with the planet and also interact with one another more importantly you might have actually found a sibling to Triton the moon of Neptune but for now that's kind of all we know once we discover something else about these unusual objects.
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