Astronomers have spotted an intriguing object lurking beyond Pluto — and it might be a new planetary neighbor.
On Tuesday, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin observatory in Chile announced that they’ve found evidence of an undiscovered dwarf planet that’s 4.3 billion miles from the Sun, or about 46 times as far from the Sun as the Earth.
The candidate world has been provisionally dubbed 2026 ED138. If its status is confirmed, it will be the first addition to our solar system’s dwarf planet family since the classification was defined by the International Astronomical Union in 2006.
“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Matthew Holman, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”
