SPACE
Strange objects discovered past Neptune
WORDS STEPHANIE PAPPAS
Many of the objects just discovered hail from the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of the Solar System full of icy bodies
© Getty / Elke Gabriel / NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
A six-year search of space beyond the orbit of Neptune has netted 461 newly discovered objects.
These objects include four that are more than 230 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – an astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun, which is about 93 million miles. These extraordinarily distant objects might shed light on Planet Nine, a theoretical body that might be hiding in deep space, its gravity affecting the orbits of some of the rocky objects at the Solar System’s edge.