Researchers May Have Discovered the 6th Dwarf Planet - CNET
Space is vast, with trillions of objects in it, so it’s not necessarily a surprise when scientists find new objects there, even if it’s sometimes entirely by accident. Some objects are scarcer than others, and dwarf planets in our solar system are among the rarest, with only five recognized examples. A group of researchers from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory may have just found a sixth.
Meet ED138, a dwarf planet candidate. It was found earlier in October when Rubin Operations team member Matthew Holman noted an unusually large object uncovered by a program he’d written with colleague Kevin Napier to scan Rubin Observatory data for moving objects.
“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Holman said in a statement. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”
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Holman ran the search...
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