Oct 042018
 

So nicknamed because of the “TG” designation and its discovery near Halloween 2015, “The Goblin” is a *damned* *distant* object.  Roughly 300 km in diameter, its perihelion (nearest distance to the sun) is 64.8 U… 64.8 times further from the sun than earth. But the aphelion, the furthest distance it gets from the sun, is a staggering 2,037 AU. As a consequence, each orbit takes 34,080 years. It is currently about 80 AU out, and is barely visible; for the majority of it’s orbital period, it would be too far from the sun to be visible from Earth. This implies that there may well be a *lot* of these sort of objects drifting around out there.

For comparison, Plutos aphelion is 49.3 AU.

The Goblin is nowhere near being a planet; it’s only about one-third the diameter of Ceres. But if it is representative of a large family of trans-Neptunian objects stretching out to the Oort cloud, then there is a whole lot of territory out there. Assuming we can nail down practical and efficient fusion power, then each of these objects could be mulched and turned into a substantial number of independent space colonies, or perhaps just terraformed as-is, possibly by putting a big plastic bubble around them, and then putting a powerful fusion reactor “Sun” into a roughly 24-hour orbit around the world. There’s no good reason why Man cannot seed life to a million worlds just in the immediate vicinity of the sun.

 Posted by at 2:47 am