Scientists Just Discovered A Mysterious New World Far Beyond Pluto

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Just when you thought you knew all the worlds in the solar system, astronomers go anddiscover a new object that could rewrite the space map.

This icy world, temporarily named 2017 OF201, could be a distant cousin of Pluto - and scientists mean "distant" quite literally. At its farthest point, it's more than 1,600 times the distance of Earth from the sun. At its closest, it's still 44.5 times farther than Earth.

What makes 2017 OF201 stand out is its very stretched-out path around the sun, which takes an incredible 25,000 Earth-years to complete. For comparison, Pluto makes a lap around the sun every 248 Earth-years.

How this world got to the edge of the solar system is a mystery - perhaps the result of close encounters with a giant planet like Jupiter or Neptune that tossed it out into a wide orbit. Or maybe when it was originally ejected, it ended up in the so-called Oort Cloud before returning. The Oort Cloud is thought to be a sphere of ancient, icy objects surrounding the solar system. NASA says the cloud remains a theory because the comets there have been too faint and distant to be directly observed.

The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which catalogs new moons and other small bodies in the solar system, announced the discovery on May 21. At roughly 435 miles wide, 2017 OF201 could qualify as a dwarf planet, the same designation Pluto has had since its demotion from ninth planet in 2006.

"Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe," said Sihao Cheng, the Institute for Advanced Study researcher who led the discovery, in a statement, "there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system."

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