New Minor Planet Spotted Past Pluto, One of the Largest Distant Objects in the Solar System

There’s a new frozen oddball orbiting the Sun, and it’s not your average space rock. It’s a planet—a minor one, to be fair—but one of the largest yet discovered and with an orbit around the Sun that puts our own planet’s orbit to shame. The minor world is dubbed 2017 OF201; the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center added the object to its catalog on May 21. Despite its classification, the planet measures somewhere between 290 and 510 miles (470 and 820 kilometers) across. Its upper size limit would put the minor planet in the same wheelhouse as Ceres, the largest asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, boasting a diameter of about 592 miles (952 km). The team of astronomers—led by Sihao Cheng, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study—first spotted 2017 OF201 in archival images, but only now is the object officially recognized as a trans-Neptunian object, or TNO. TNOs are bodies in the solar system that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune, which is 30 times mo ... Read full article.