There’s ANOTHER tiny mystery planet lurking at the edge of our solar system
Astronomers spot dwarf world at the freezing outskirts of humanity's cosmic neighbourhood
Astronomers have discovered another tiny dwarf planet lurking at the very edge of the solar system.
The mini world is just 330 miles across and is set about 8.5 billion miles from The Sun.
The dwarf planet 2014 UZ224 takes 1,100 years to complete its orbit around The Sun and exists in a chilly region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt.
It is likely to be a dark, cold and airless world pocked with craters.
David Gerdes of the University of Michigan led a team which spotted the tiny planet and then naming it 2014 UZ224.
involved a long-painstaking process.
"Objects in the solar system, when you observe them at one instant and then a little while later, they appear to be in a different place in the sky," Gerdes said.
"We often just have a single observation of the thing, on one night.
"And then two weeks later one observation, and then five nights later another observation, and four months later another observation. So the connecting-the-dots problem is much more challenging."
The most widely known dwarf planet is Ceres, which is found in the asteroid belt near Jupiter and is famous for its "alien mystery lights".
A hypothetical world called Planet 9 is believed to be hiding near the Kuiper Belt, although astronomers haven't actually seen it yet and have only inferred its presence through mathematical calculations.
It is joined by other worlds such as Makemake, which is believed to be the largest in the Belt.
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The discovery of Planet 9 was hailed as a wonder of science and astronomy.
But this mysterious world could be fated to cause a “death dance” that wipes out almost every other major planet.
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