Astronomers have spotted a dwarf planet which is three times farther away than Pluto. This makes it the farthest object discovered in the Solar System. Once its orbit is ascertained, planetoid V774104 may teach researchers a lot about the early Solar System.
The researchers, led by Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C, used Japan’s 8-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to detect the dwarf planet. This discovery was then announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on November 10, 2015. Most searches involving distant objects tend to focus on the Solar System's plane. However, in this case, researchers focused on that region of the sky which was an average of 15° away from the ecliptic.
The discovered planetoid has been named V774104 and is between 500 and 1000 kilometers (310 to 621 miles) across. The dwarf planet lies 15.4 billion kilometers (9.56 billion miles) from the Sun, or 103 astronomical units (AU) away. One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the precise distance between the Earth and our sun.
