DISCOVERY OF THE FIRST RETROGRADE TRANSNEPTUNIAN OBJECT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report the discovery of the first transneptunian object known to be on a retrograde orbit. The discovery was made during an outer solar system survey using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). After recovery observations on the MMT, CTIO-Blanco, Gemini-South, and CFHT telescopes, we can state with certainty that the object is both transneptunian and orbits the Sun in a retrograde sense, with an orbital inclination i = 104 deg. The object has IAU Minor Planet Center provisional designation 2008 KV 42 and temporary nickname "Drac." Numerical integration of a set of initial states consistent with the astrometry shows that the semimajor axis is a ≃ 42 AU, the perihelion distance is q ∼21 AU, and that the object's orbit evolves on ∼30 million year timescales via gravitational encounters with Uranus and Neptune. The object is unlikely to be primordial and thus needs a supply mechanism from a long-lived source. We outline several scenarios which could have emplaced the object on its current orbit, including a currently unobserved reservoir of large-inclination orbits beyond Neptune which may also supply the Halley-type comets.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".