Astroboffins analyzed old data and found a candidate dwarf planet in the Oort cloud A trio of scientists have published a paper that explains how they found a dwarf planet in a database. As explained in a pre-press paper [PDF] titled “Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201”, in 2014 scientists used Chile’s Blanco 4m telescope for a project called the Dark Energy Camera …
It is not your horoscope that you should be worrying about, but the Grebulons' horoscope.
"With no other options, they decided to land on the first planet they found and monitor the first thing of interest that they detected. The Grebulons landed their ship on the planet Rupert, the tenth planet in the Sol Star System, and they began to monitor all transmissions from the only planet with life in the system: Earth.
The Grebulons became infatuated with Earth; eating McDonald's hamburgers, watching television, and furnishing their ship with human inventions such as waterbeds and hi-fi audio systems. In order to collect these items, they had a special box number in New Hampshire where they made regular pickups, and paid via American Express. They also became enamoured with astrology and invited the alternate Earth's Tricia McMillan to Rupert to map out their astrological horoscopes and offered her reheated chicken nuggets.
In a misguided attempt, the Grebulon Leader ordered Earth destroyed before it could rise into Capricorn. As a classic Taurus, this was very ominous for him. He ended up having a bad month indeed as there were no longer transmissions from Earth to monitor."
From: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Grebulons
Astronomers have a really great habit of making data public once they are done with their analysis. Rather than always having to apply for new observations, you can go to the Virtual Observatory, and see if the object of your interest has been observed in the right wavelengths and with the appropriate instruments in the past, and reuse those data. Other sciences might well benefit from a similar approach, although the astronomers do have the advantage that no privacy issues are involved, unlike e.g. medical data.
Confusing title - says that a candidate dwarf planet has been discovered in the 'Oort Cloud', but then doesn't make any reference to the Oort Cloud in the article. The Oort Cloud itself is a purely hypothetical construct and has never been observed, so discovering something in it would be rather difficult. Given the AU distances being quoted, possibly the author is confusing the Kuiper Belt with the so-called Oort Cloud.
The reference is in the abstract of the paper.
"We report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate, 2017 OF201, currently located at a distance
of 90.5 au. Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with a semi-major axis of
838 au and a perihelion of 44.9 au precisely determined from 19 observations over seven years."
> outside the clustering observed in extreme trans-Neptunian objects
Given we still don't really know what's out there, any conclusion would be premature. As of today we might have spotted indeed a bunch of objects orbiting on the same side, but clearly (as 2017 OF201 seems to prove) there are more to be found. probably a whole lot of them, very small and thus extremely difficult to spot.
Just think of all those being right now on the far point of their highly eccentric 25000 years orbits, some 1000-2000 AU away! There would be absolutely no chance to detect them for another 125 centuries...
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