Found at the edge of the solar system: "Goblin & # 39;

The dwarf planet, formerly TG387, was discovered in 2015 around Halloween (hence its spooky nickname), but it was not unveiled until this week after three years of observation.

It took a long time to pinpoint the planet's orbit, with the help of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the Discovery Channel Telescope in Arizona.

The icy world is only 186 kilometers long and it takes 40,000 years to circle the sun. It is 2300 times farther from the sun than the Earth in its farthest orbit.

For perspective, the goblin is "two and a half times farther from the sun than Pluto currently is," according to the Carnegie Institution for Science.

(PLUS: the attacks of the Second World War were felt at the edge of space))

"These objects are in elongated orbits, and we can only detect them when they are closest to the Sun," said Sheepard, one of the astronomers who discovered the discovery, in a courier. electronic. "For about 99% of their orbits, they are too far away and therefore too weak for us to observe, we only see the tip of the iceberg."

The most intriguing aspect of this discovery is perhaps the possible implication that there is a Planet X or a more massive Planet Nine, much more distant than the Goblin itself.

This discovery reinforces the hypothesis that the planet X, which could be 10 times larger than the Earth, could influence the orbits of objects such as 2015 TG387 in the Kuiper belt.