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Tengrinews.kz – Astronomers from the United States have made an unexpected discovery on the outskirts of the Solar System. The object they identified may be a new dwarf planet, according to their calculations. The research was published on the arXiv portal, citing Gazeta.Ru.
The celestial body, named 2017 OF201, potentially challenges one of the most intriguing space hypotheses of recent decades — the existence of Planet Nine.
According to scientists, the diameter of the new planet is about 700 kilometers — three times smaller than Pluto, but still large enough to be considered a dwarf planet.
2017 OF201 is three times farther from Earth than Neptune and follows an extremely elongated orbit that stretches more than 1,600 astronomical units (the distance from Earth to the Sun). This means it travels deep into the Oort Cloud — a distant zone filled with icy bodies bordering interstellar space.
A full orbit of this dwarf planet takes about 25,000 years, and it can only be observed during 0.5 percent of that time — roughly one century. The object is now rapidly dimming and will soon become unobservable.
The discovery was made during the search for Planet Nine — a hypothetical object whose gravitational influence was believed to explain the strange clustering of icy body orbits beyond Neptune. However, the orbit of 2017 OF201 does not fit this pattern, which, according to the researchers, may weaken the case for the existence of Planet Nine.
