Less than five months into its ten-year survey of the sky, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has found what is probably a new dwarf planet, Science News reports. The object, named 2026 ED138, is about 47 times farther from the Sun than Earth and takes roughly 280 years to complete an orbit.
Matt Holman of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory spotted it in October by hunting through Rubin’s data for faint moving points of light. It is estimated to be between 600 and 1,500 kilometres across, which could put it in the same league as Ceres or Makemake.
Amateur astronomer Sam Deen then found the object on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory in 1954, and it also turned up in survey data from 2016. The results were presented at a planetary science meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Spokane, Washington.
Source: Science News