Discovered: The Most-Distant Solar System Object Ever Observed

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.

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?"

It makes me wonder if there&#x27;s a distance so great in the observable universe that light from an object would spread out so much that it couldn&#x27;t be recognized as an object.<p>I&#x27;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.

Technical info from the IAU: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minorplanetcenter.net&#x2F;mpec&#x2F;K18&#x2F;K18Y14.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minorplanetcenter.net&#x2F;mpec&#x2F;K18&#x2F;K18Y14.html</a> . 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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minorplanetcenter.net&#x2F;db_search&#x2F;show_object?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;object_id=2018+VG18" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minorplanetcenter.net&#x2F;db_search&#x2F;show_object?utf8...</a> .

Proxima Centauri is about 4.24ly away and has a mass of about 0.12x the mass of the sun.<p>I think that means our sun is the object with the deepest gravity well, out to about (1&#x2F;1.12)*4.24 = 3.79ly away.<p>I think that means that there could plausibly be objects out to about 3.79ly away that are in orbit around our sun.<p>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!

So this object is a bit more than 11 billion miles from the sun?<p>And Alpha Centauri is 4.2 light years away, which is 24,635,923,200,000 miles?<p>So this object is roughly 0.046% of the way to the next star?<p>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.<p>Almost 10% of the distance between the stars consists of the systems that surround the stars?