Astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet far beyond Pluto's orbit, meaning that there could be millions of undiscovered objects, like a world larger than Earth, in this distant location, according to Space.com.
The newly discovered planet, which has been called 2012 VP113, joins fellow dwarf planet Sedna as a legitimate resident of the mainly unexplored region scientists have named the "inner Oort Cloud."
Sedna and 2012 VP113 might have been pulled into their orbits by a big planet not yet discovered, according to Space.com.
"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," study co-author Chadwick Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, said to Space.com. "They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually know about the solar system."
For a number of decades, astronomers have worked on dividing our solar system into three main sectors: an inner zone containing planets like Mars and Earth, a middle zone for gas planets like Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn, and an outer region called the Kuiper Belt.
When Sedna was discovered in 2003, it meant the map was incomplete. Sedna is 620 miles wide, ad has an elliptical orbit, coming no closer to then sun than 76 astronomical units, possibly going as far out as 940 AU, or so.
Now astronomers have discovered that Sedna is not alone out there, according to Space.com.
Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., discovered 2012 VP113 thanks to the Dark Energy Camera.
The Dark Energy Camera is installed on a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Follow-up observations by the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, also in Chile, showed more details of 2012 VP113's orbit and helped the two researchers learn more about the object, according to Space.com.
At approximately 280 miles wide, 2012 VP113 is big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet if it's composed primarily of ice, according to the researchers.
Trujillo and Sheppard estimated that around 900 bodies larger than Sedna could exist in this realm, which the two have called the inner Oort Cloud.
The population of objects in the inner Oort Cloud might exceed that of the Kuiper Belt, according to the researchers, along with the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
"Some of these inner Oort Cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth," Sheppard said in a statement, according to Space.com "This is because many of the inner Oort Cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology."
Their research was published on March 26 in the journal Nature.
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