Astronomers Find Distant Planet, Name It After Tax Form, Call This Progress

Scientists find distant space rock with a name like a tax form, proving the universe’s suburbs are just as weird as Earth’s.

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I am not making this up.

Astronomers have discovered yet another chunk of frozen space debris orbiting our Sun, and they are very excited about it. This is because astronomers get excited about pretty much anything that moves in space, including their own research grants.

The new discovery is called “2017 OF201,” which sounds like the name of a tax form that the IRS would use to audit your deductions for home office supplies for your Only Fans account. But it’s actually a “minor planet,” which is astronomy-speak for “a really big rock that we’re trying to make sound important.”

How big is this rock? Well, it’s somewhere between 290 and 510 miles across, which means the astronomers have narrowed it down to within a mere 220-mile margin of error. This is the kind of precision that you normally associate with pizza delivery estimates.

To put this in perspective: if 2017 OF201 were a pizza, it would be either a personal-size pizza or a pizza large enough to feed the entire population of Wyoming. Scientists are “working on it.”

The discovery was made by a team led by Sihao Cheng, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is apparently a real place where people get paid to stare at old photographs of space and occasionally shout, “Hey, what’s that thing over there?” This particular “thing” had been lurking unnoticed in archival images, probably feeling very hurt that nobody had paid attention to it since 2017.

But here’s where it gets really exciting, if you’re the kind of person who gets excited by objects that are really, really, REALLY far away. This space rock orbits the Sun at a distance of up to 838 “astronomical units,” which is science talk for “so far away that even light gets tired thinking about the commute.”

To help you understand just how far this is: Neptune, which is already ridiculously far from the Sun—30 times farther than Earth—is like the neighborhood grocery store compared to 2017 OF201.

Because this thing is so preposterously distant, astronomers have classified it as an “extreme trans-Neptunian object,” or “ETNO.” This is not to be confused with an “ETNO bracelet,” which would be a very different kind of discovery and probably more useful for everyday life. And no, I’m not going to explain what at ETNO bracelet is, because that’s not the topic of this article and I don’t have time to do the research of Googling “ETNO bracelet.”

The existence of these ETNOs has scientists all worked up about something called “Planet Nine,” which is a theoretical planet that may or may not exist somewhere out there in the cosmic equivalent of the sticks. Planet Nine is supposed to explain why all these distant objects are clustered together in weird ways, kind of like how the existence of a really good donut shop explains why there’s always a cluster of police cars in the same parking lot.

Of course, nobody has actually SEEN Planet Nine, which would normally be a problem in most scientific endeavors. But in astronomy, not being able to see something is considered perfectly normal. In fact, I suspect that if astronomers could actually see everything they were looking for, they would be deeply disappointed and would have to find new hobbies, like bird watching or competitive cheese sculpture.

The search for Planet Nine has produced various alternative theories, including the possibility that the gravitational weirdness is caused by “a ring of debris” or even “a primordial black hole.” A primordial black hole would be a black hole left over from the very beginning of the universe, which presumably has been sitting out there all this time feeling very old and complaining that the cosmos just isn’t what it used to be.

But nothing captures our imagination quite like the idea of a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the outer darkness, which is why Planet Nine has become the Bigfoot of astronomy—widely discussed, fervently sought, and never actually found, despite numerous blurry photographs and breathless testimonials from people who claim to have almost spotted it.

Meanwhile, 2017 OF201 continues its lonely orbit in the frigid suburbs of our solar system, taking approximately forever to complete one trip around the Sun. This is actually not much different from my daily commute, except that my commute doesn’t require me to be 838 astronomical units away from anything warm.

The discovery of 2017 OF201 reminds us that space is still full of surprises, most of which are very cold, very far away, and very difficult to pronounce. It also reminds us that somewhere out there, in the vast cosmic darkness, there might be an enormous planet that we haven’t found yet, which is either really exciting or really embarrassing, depending on your perspective.

But hey, at least we’re making progress…? Pretty soon, at this rate, we’ll have catalogued every single frozen rock in the outer solar system, and then we can move on to more pressing scientific questions, such as: “Why do astronomers always give their discoveries names that sound like license plate numbers?”