Our solar system may be much larger than we thought

Astronomers announced Tuesday the discovery of the most distant object in the solar system and that it could hint at larger, unknown planets that orbit the sun just beyond Pluto.

The previous record-holder for the most distant object in the Solar System was dwarf planet Eris, which orbits at a distance of 97 AU.

The next-closest objects, Sedna and VP113, are roughly 80 times farther from the sun than Earth, well beyond the Kuiper Belt, which Pluto and thousands of other icy bodies call home. The nearest star beyond our sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4.2 light-years or 265,000 AU away.

“We don’t know anything about its orbit”, Scott Sheppard, scientists at the Carnegie Institute of Washington and leader of the team that discovered the object, said at the meeting.

If the latter alternative is the case, it adds one more piece to a planetary puzzle: How did those objects get into their current orbits?

The mysterious planet could be part of a theoretical space structure called the Oort cloud, which is said to surround the edge of our solar system. If this new objects closest distance to the Sun is 103 AU, the group of two scientifically fascinating residents of the inner Oort cloud will increase to a group of three.

Inner Oort cloud objects are more intriguing than Kuiper belt objects because they lie too far away from Neptune to have ever been influenced by its pull, says Sheppard. “But if its orbit brings it to within 50 AU of the sun at a few point, it would be considered a scattered Kuiper Belt object, that is an object that likely scattered off of Neptune sometime in the distant past”, Sheppard said.

It’s also possible that V774104 follows an elliptical orbit and will soon veer much closer to the Sunday. “This can help us understand how the outer solar system was formed”.

Trujillo and Sheppard discovered the object using the Subaru Telescope, an 8.2 meter flagship telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

Scientists will continue examining the new dwarf planet over the next year, after which they hope to pin down its orbit.