Scientists have discovered a new orbiting body at the edge of the solar system, billions of miles farther from the sun than Pluto and about one-sixth as wide, The Washington Post reports.
The Minor Planet Center, which is operated by the International Astronomical Union, announced the discovery on Tuesday. The dwarf planet is officially 2015 TG387, but has been given the nickname “the Goblin.”
It is “about 300 kilometers in diameter, on the small end of a dwarf planet,” according to astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington. Sheppard, along with colleagues at the University of Hawaii, the University of Oklahoma and Northern Arizona University, found the Goblin. It was first seen three years ago, on October 13, 2015, through the Subaru telescope at Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.
The Goblin’s skewed orbit, which mirrors the orbits of fellow dwarf planets “Biden” and “Sedna,” could indicate another, much larger planet even farther out on the edge of the solar system, according to planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. Sheppard wrote in an article for Nature in 2014 that objects like the Goblin would move in a particular way to avoid a possible “Planet Nine.”
“This clustering can only be maintained if the solar system hosts an additional, yet unseen, super-Earth type planet,” Batygin said, adding that he’s “running code as we speak that evaluates how the inferred orbit and mass of Planet Nine are affected by this new object.”
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