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.”
Based on observations so far, 2026 ED138 appears to have a diameter between around 370 and 930 miles, which would make it a moderately sized dwarf planet. For comparison, Pluto and Eris, the two largest dwarf planets by volume, each have a diameter of over 1,400 miles.
But astronomers must also demonstrate that 2026 ED138 has enough mass and gravity so that it pulled itself into a round shape; it’s this key stipulation that separates dwarf planets from large asteroids.
The candidate world also has an unusual orbit that’s tilted 25 degrees away from the solar system’s orbital plane. It would appear, from our perspective, to circle the Sun in a diagonal path relative to the rest of the planets.
In addition to adding to our understanding of the solar system, astronomers see the discovery as an exciting demonstration of the Vera C. Rubin observatory’s capabilities. The facility is located on a mountaintop in Chile and uses a bevy of instruments to constantly scan the night sky. Its pièce de résistance is a 3.2-gigapixel camera that’s considered the largest digital camera ever built.
2026 ED138 is bright enough to spot with standard telescopes, but it’s a needle in a haystack of millions of stars and other shiny objects, Holman explained to the New York Times. It was the Rubin’s continuous scanning of the dark firmament that allowed astronomers using computer software to notice that one of the bright dots was moving in an orbital pattern. Once on the scent, the astronomers were able to trace its orbit across observations and locate it in images taken by other telescopes, and thereby infer its size.
Holman said that the discovery of this potential dwarf planet isn’t an argument for or against the existence of Planet Nine, a hypothetical full-sized planet in the outer reaches of our solar system that some astronomers believe exists but hasn’t been detected.
“But it is evidence that we have the capacity to find things and that there are amazing things left to be found,” Holman he told the NYT. “There could easily be a Mars-sized object out there that just hasn’t been found yet, or bigger.”
More on dwarf planets: Head of NASA Calls for Pluto to Be Made a Planet Again
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