LONDON: Humans have explored only a tiny, tiny fraction of the universe, so we can’t rule out the possibility objects exist out there that we haven’t seen yet — even giant planets right in our backyard.
You can divvy up the Solar System into four parts: the inner rocky planets, the Asteroid Belt, the gas giants, and a huge cluster of small icy bodies called the Kuiper Belt. Some of those icy chunks in the Kuiper Belt are big enough to count as dwarf planets (like Pluto and Eris).
Now scientists think something bigger — perhaps four times bigger than Earth — is lurking out there, just beyond the Kuiper Belt.
“I think there are definitely things out there bigger than Pluto that are yet to be discovered,” Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution, told the Washington Post.
Sheppard worked on a paper published in the journal Nature in 2014 that describes the discovery a mystery object on the fringe of the Kuiper Belt. The astronomers nicknamed it “Biden.” It’s no bigger than a dwarf planet, and they estimate that it’s three times the distance that Pluto is from Earth, or roughly 9 billion miles away.
In fact, there’s evidence that quite a few of these mystery objects, none of them larger than a dwarf planet, drifting at the fringes of the Kuiper Belt, according to the paper. And they aren’t just randomly floating around out there: They all appear to follow a similar orbital pattern, albeit a really strange one.
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