
Discovered: The Most-Distant Solar System Object Ever Observed - InInteraction
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2428
======
stcredzero
People lament the light speed barrier, because it seems to preclude vast space
empires of Sci-fi. But there are countless bodies at vast distances just
within a few light years. If we develop fusion power, just the neighborhood of
the Sun and the Centauri systems would constitute tens of thousands of
colonization suitable dwarf planet sized bodies or larger. If we build
artificial habitats, the population of all of those systems could easily
number in the trillions. That's a pretty vast setting.

~~~
lkrubner
But it is worth asking why people want to believe that a narrative can be
extended to space? Humans structure their experience using narratives, and
this works okay on Earth. Though even on Earth, there are many known problems
with the way humans use narratives:

1.) police will tell you that eye witnesses are highly inaccurate

2.) psychologists can tell you all about the way people hurt themselves with
inaccurate narratives about themselves

3.) human rights activists work constantly against narratives that take a
racial category as a first class character, with real and knowable attributes

And those problems arise on Earth. At least since Einstein's Theory Of
Relativity we've known that normal human narrative will not extend to space.
And yet people want to this to be true. There is a kind of nostalgia that
infects most writing about space, a belief that our exploration of space can
be like the discovery of the frontier in centuries past. Even intelligent
people sometimes talk this way, even though they know it is an inaccurate way
to think about the universe.

I suppose this is sort of in the category of "Why do 99% of sci-fi movies act
as if there is a gravity on spaceships, or assume a technology that can easily
assume that a 1 G warp of the space time continuum does not itself warp the
ship into a ball?"

Basically, people don't want their sci-fi stories to be too accurate. And I
guess that's fine. Maybe it's all just entertainment. But then we shouldn't
take that entertainment and act like any of it can ever be real.

~~~
stcredzero
_At least since Einstein 's Theory Of Relativity we've known that normal human
narrative will not extend to space._

Meh. Human narratives have encompassed characters who live for hundreds of
billions of years and who experience time warped in any number of ways. There
are even successful mainstream movies that deal with such issues. Multiple
ones going back decades.

 _Basically, people don 't want their sci-fi stories to be too accurate. And I
guess that's fine. Maybe it's all just entertainment._

You could totally re-tell the entire Star Wars and Star Trek canon in such a
setting. It's not that people don't want it. Most people don't know enough to
know they would want it. Heck, half of everyone seems to think "there's no
gravity in space."

(EDIT: By "such a setting," I mean in just several cubic light years around
Sol and Alpha Centauri.)

~~~
lkrubner
" _People lament the light speed barrier, because it seems to preclude vast
space empires of Sci-fi._ "

Assume you are the Emperor of a vast interstellar empire. You order your best
general to go and attack a star system 10 light years away. Your opponent
possibly does the same. 20 years after you give the order, you are told that
your general lost the battle (or won the battle). How would you verify that?
It's not just that you have to wait another 20 years to verify it, it's that
events will pile up in excess of what you can verify. The best way to
understand the outcome of this battle is to read what Kyle Kingsbury has
written about distributed databases:

[https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)

Because, for all practical purposes, the Universe is a distributed database
with a serious network partition. It is not Eventually Consistent, but rather,
it is Infinitely Inconsistent. The writes exceed the reads, and will continue
to do so infinitely into the future.

How do you build an interstellar empire around that reality?

As an experiment, it might be fun to create a game that is deliberately
inconsistent. That would appeal to a very small niche, because most people
crave a consistent narrative experience. But a game designed around a database
that is deliberately inconsistent would help people think correctly about the
difficulty of building empires in space, or engaging in any other common sci-
fi tropes.

~~~
rlpb
> It is not Eventually Consistent...

If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent. Nobody has
ever found a case where it isn't. Relativity was predicted to exist because
"eventual consistency" was assumed axiomatic in our universe. Essentially,
eventual consistency is exactly why the universal speed limit exists.

> but rather, it is Infinitely Inconsistent

We will fall behind in knowledge of events, but causal knowledge of an event
in our universe, if it exists, is always consistent.

Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only database
(think git), not data that gets updated (like a key/value database).

~~~
stcredzero
> If there's anything the universe is, it's Eventually Consistent.

Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually
Consistent. It's simply consistent. What's really going on, is that some
programmers don't understand relativity. Relativity doesn't actually say that
everyone gets their own reality. There is a consistent consensual reality.
Spacetime intervals are consistent between all observers. The time ordering of
events changes depending on the observer's POV and relative motion, but there
is an underlying consistent reality that's the same for everybody.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAEHKAR5hU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo)

The "Spacetime Globe" by Minute Physics is the most helpful thing I've seen,
flat out, for understanding relativity.

> Knowledge of events in our universe is like an immutable, append-only
> database

This is correct. Relativity just says that different users get different
results, depending on how they query. The underlying database is the same for
everybody. (Some parts of it are forbidden access, of course.)

Programmers have been causing physicists to facepalm since at least the USENET
days. I should know. I was one of them!

~~~
rlpb
> Please disregard this inconsistency guff! The Universe isn't Eventually
> Consistent. It's simply consistent.

We agree except for what we mean by "eventually" which is just semantics. What
I mean by "eventually" is that eventually all the information arrives for my
(or anyone's) model of the universe to match reality, analogous to eventually
consistent distributed databases. Like an eventually consistent database
however we can never catch up completely, since new events are happening in
the universe all the time. It takes time for this information to "replicate",
but there is no inconsistency. I was following lkrubner's analogy.

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wuliwong
I haven't been keeping up on this topic. It's very exciting. If I'm
understanding what I've read, this is the furthest of the "dwarf planets"
which lie well beyond Pluto. There is a hypothesis that another planet (Planet
9) larger than the earth is out there as well. Planet 9 is what they believe
explains some orbital peculiarities shared by these dwarf planets? Is the
Planet 9 thought to be even further out than "Farout?"

~~~
KnightOfWords
This object is currently the most distant detected but Sedna's highly
eccentric orbit takes it much further from the Sun.

Planet Nine's orbit, if it exists, takes it somewhat further away from the Sun
than Sedna.

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everdev
It makes me wonder if there's a distance so great in the observable universe
that light from an object would spread out so much that it couldn't be
recognized as an object.

I'd imagine there are distant stars ejected from galaxies that would render
only as single pixel. It seems possible given enough distance that an entire
galaxy could render as a single pixel as well, but I wonder if that distance
is greater than the observable universe.

~~~
PeanutNore
What exactly do you mean by "render only as a single pixel"? With a low enough
resolution sensor, the sun would render as a single pixel when observed from
earth.

~~~
stcredzero
A guy who worked at the undergraduate computer lab when I was in college in
the 90's was bemused by all of the print samples and signs by the laser
printers, so he made his own:

The caption read, "This is Chris rendered in one color at 1 DPI on the
Dinotronic," underneath a 7x7 monochrome portrait of himself.

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japaget
Technical info from the IAU:
[https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K18/K18Y14.html](https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K18/K18Y14.html)
. The orbit is highly uncertain but appears to be highly elliptical, with a
perihelion inside the orbit of Neptune and an apogee of roughly 1.5 times the
current distance. See also
[https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8...](https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=%E2%9C%93&object_id=2018+VG18)
.

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jstanley
Proxima Centauri is about 4.24ly away and has a mass of about 0.12x the mass
of the sun.

I think that means our sun is the object with the deepest gravity well, out to
about (1/1.12)*4.24 = 3.79ly away.

I think that means that there could plausibly be objects out to about 3.79ly
away that are in orbit around our sun.

The object from the article is about 0.0019ly away, so there could be quite a
lot of new most-distant solar system objects still to be discovered!

~~~
XaspR8d
Some estimates for the outer boundary of the Oort Cloud put it at 200,000AU =
3.16ly (more conservative estimates seem to be 1ly or less). Even the inner
boundary is thought to be at least double the distance of the object just
discovered, so current astonomical hypotheses align with your idea that
there's a lot more out there.

~~~
jstanley
Given Thorondor's sibling comment to yours:

Alpha Centauri A has a mass of 1.1x the sun, and is about 4.37ly away, which
would mean our sun's gravity well runs out at

(1/2.1)*4.37 = 2.08ly - i.e. any object in orbit 2.08 ly away would (even if
affected by nothing else), fall into Alpha Centauri A's gravity well before
completing a full orbit and therefore couldn't possibly remain in orbit around
our sun.

If that's true (and I have no idea whether any of it is true), then I think
2.08ly must be an upper bound on the outer boundary of the Oort cloud.

EDIT: Ah, I'm thinking 2-dimensionally. Of course, something could be in a
much larger orbit in a plane that doesn't go near Alpha Centauri.

------
lkrubner
So this object is a bit more than 11 billion miles from the sun?

And Alpha Centauri is 4.2 light years away, which is 24,635,923,200,000 miles?

So this object is roughly 0.046% of the way to the next star?

Assuming that the Alpha Centauri system reaches out to us as much as our
system reaches out to Alpha Centauri, I am surprised that the two systems
reach out to each other as much as they do.

Almost 10% of the distance between the stars consists of the systems that
surround the stars?

