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The universe continually stuns even its most enthusiastic observers. An astronomer was to reveal this week the most distant object of the solar system. And then, just hours before its presentation, an even more distant discovery was discovered.
A new object has been discovered to try to map the outer envelope of our solar system.
Nicknamed FarFarOut, this mysterious object is 140 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth.
That's about 21 billion km.
And that makes the newly identified body become the farthest object of our solar system, if its discovery is confirmed.
The current record holder calls FarOut when he was spotted last year.
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FarOut is a dwarf planet 120 times the Earth-Sun distance spotted by the same team.
Dr. Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science was responsible for the latest discovery.
The team of the Carnegie Institution for Science is trying to find an elusive body called Planet Nine, supposed to boast 10 times the mass of the Earth.
It is assumed that the hypothetical Planet Nine, which hides in the distant cloud of Oort, exerts a gravitational pull on the objects located in the depths of the solar system.
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Dr. Sheppard discovered FarFarOut when a lecture he had to give on the work of his team was postponed and he resumed the analysis of his data.
"We are all right now," he announced at the rescheduled conference.
"Yesterday it snowed and I had nothing to do, so I went through some of our data."
He said that FarFarOut was a little mysterious. "He is very weak; it is at the limit of our ability to detect it.
"We do not know anything about the orbit of this object, we simply know that it is far, far away."
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Dr. Sheppard added, "So 20 UA (astronomical units, the distance between the sun and the Earth) farther than FarOut.
"This has just been discovered in our data from last month."
Sheppard said that other observations were about to further clarify the discovery.
The FarOut and FarFarOut discoveries are so new that the objects have not been sufficiently studied to give an idea of their orbit around the Sun.
Mr. Sheppard has forged a reputation in discovering many small moons of the solar system, believes that it could take another year or two of calculations to properly understand its properties.
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