Nature Hub

From :- Sky & Telescope   By :- David L. Chandler Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Image showing the current location of Pluto, Neptune, and 2017 OF 201 . Jiaxuan Li and Sihao Cheng A newly discovered object in the outer solar system, 2017 OF201, is the largest found in more than a decade. It was hiding in plain sight, lurking deep inside terabytes of publicly available data, some of which are more than a decade old. But this particular needle in a haystack — the first new dwarf planet in the outer solar system to be found in more than a decade — took months of computational work to ferret out from the mass of background stars and noise. The newfound object, which for now bears the unwieldy name of 2017 OF 201 , is approximately 700 kilometers (400 miles) wide and follows an extremely elliptical orbit around the Sun that takes an estimated 25,000 years to complete. Its size puts it in the category of dwarf planets, along with Pluto, the asteroid Ceres, and other objects. It’s on...

  From - Space.com By -    Julian Dossett   Edited by - Amal Udawatta An artist's depiction of the Lucy spacecraft flying past a pair of Trojan asteroids.   (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) "These relics are effectively fossils of the planet formation process, holding vital clues to deciphering the history of our solar system." The next stop for NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft Lucy is a space rock named Donaldjohanson, an object researchers recently learned is about 150 million years old. Lucy  will fly past the three-mile-wide (five-kilometer-wide) asteroid on April 20, but the trip mostly serves as a rehearsal for other asteroid encounters down the road — namely, Lucy's final destination: Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. Over a 12-year mission, Lucy is scheduled to visit a total of 11 asteroids across two swarms that are leading and trailing  Jupiter . Still, every asteroid counts for this mission, and a  new paper  from res...