The Solar System Officially Has A New, Extraordinarily Dwarf Member: “Suggests It May Be More...

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Researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey announced that they have detected a candidate dwarf planet with an extreme orbit around the Sun. The object, named 2017 OF201 , is located beyond Neptune and it is estimated that it orbits the Sun roughly every 25,000 years.

The findings have been confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center but still have to be peer reviewed. However, the discovery of this object could reshape what we know about our solar system and challenge a hypothesis that a Planet X is lurking in the dark vastness beyond Neptune.

They pinpointed and tracked the potential dwarf planet's motion across 19 sets of images and then plotted its trajectory with a computational algorithm they developed. At its closest on its orbit to the Sun, 2017 OF201 is 44.5 times farther from the Sun than Earth, or 44.5 AU, roughly the distance of Pluto's orbit. Meanwhile at its furthest, the object reaches a whopping distance of over 1,600 AU.

"2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable, " said Sihao Cheng, lead author of the study, in a statement .

"It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit," said Eritas Yang, one of the study's co-authors.

"There may have been more than one step in its migration," added Cheng. " It's possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back."