How's The Goblin? could reformulate our ideas about the solar system

With the help of telescopes oriented beyond Pluto towards the far reaches of our solar system, a trio of astronomers discovered a tiny dwarf planet whose extraordinary trajectory around the sun adds to the evidence that A larger object, not yet discovered, is hiding even further.

The discovery, announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union and described in a paper submitted to The Astronomical Journal, fits in as part of ongoing efforts to find Planet X, aka Planet 9. It is the hypothetical "super-Earth" or an even bigger planet whose existence astronomers have been trying to confirm for several years now.

"Discovery supports the existence of a ninth planet – the gravity of the ninth planet seems to guide this new planet … and others [similar objects] in similar orbits, "Sara Seager, Global Science Specialist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told NBC News MACH in an email she was not involved in the research.

The new world is tentatively named 2015 TG387 but has been dubbed "the goblin" because it was first observed around Halloween in 2015 and because of the "TG" on its behalf.

Yet even without the connection to Halloween, The Goblin seems more than a little scary. It's so far that even through telescopes, it's visible as a sifted spot of light, astronomers said. Preliminary evidence indicates that it is an ice ball about 300 kilometers in diameter with a gravitational field about 200 times smaller than Earth's.

If you set foot on The Goblin, "you might weigh as much as a squirrel," one of the discoverers of the dwarf planet, Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University of Flagstaff, told NBC MACH news in an email.

Then there is the strange orbit of Goblin.

Unlike the Earth and other planets, whose orbits around the sun are almost circular, The Goblin moves around the sun in an exaggerated ellipse. At its closest point, the dwarf planet is about 65 times the distance from the Earth to the sun (a distance that astronomers call an astronomical unit, or AU). At the furthest point of its orbit, the goblin is about 2300 AU from the sun, about 214 billion miles. Pluto is about 34 AU from the sun.

The goblin and similar "trans-Neptunian" objects – astronomers believe that there might be a million – are so far away that they can only be seen when they are close to the sun in their orbits.

"For about 99% of their orbits, they are too far away and therefore too weak for us to observe," said Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, another of the discoverers of the dwarf planet, in a email. The Goblin took 40,000 years to achieve a single orbit, he added.

This is the long orbit loop of the Goblin that led astronomers to conclude that the discovery of the dwarf planet brings additional support to the Planet X hypothesis.

"Its orbit is similar to other ultraperipheral objects in the solar system," said Trujillo. The objects share an orbital plane inclined to the orbital plane of the eight known planets, he continued, and get closer to the sun on the same side of the solar system. "This orbital scheme suggests that something very important is affecting their orbits," he said.

In a statement, Sheppard compared The Goblin and similar objects to "bread crumbs leading us to Planet X".

"The more we find, the better we can understand the outer solar system and the possible planet that we believe is shaping their orbits – a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the evolution of the solar system," he said. .

The goblin was observed for the first time with the help of a telescope placed at the top of dormant Mauna Kea volcano on the big island of Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and at the Discovery Channel Telescope near Happy Jack, Arizona.

And the astronomers are not finished yet.

"We are continuing our study, which is the largest and deepest ever for remote objects in the solar system," Sheppard said. "We will observe again planet X and other distant objects of the solar system in November."

Want more stories about astronomy?

FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.