A newly discovered dwarf planet lurks beyond Neptune
Scientists using a telescope in Hawaii have discovered a never-before-seen dwarf planet lurking within the ring of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The small new world -- temporarily named 2015 RR245 -- is about 435 miles in diameter and is in a wide orbit that brings it farther away from the sun than Neptune is.
The newly-spotted dwarf planet joins a cohort of other small worlds in that part of space, including Pluto. Together, dwarf planets can help scientists learn a lot about how the solar system became what we see today.
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"The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun," Michele Bannister, one of the researchers who helped discover the dwarf planet using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, said in a statement.
"They let us piece together the history of our solar system. But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint: it's really exciting to find one that's large and bright enough that we can study it in detail."
2015 RR245 is now on the way to its closest approach with the sun, bringing it about 3 billion miles from the star in 2096, according to the statement.
At its closest approach, the dwarf planet will be just outside the orbit of Haumea, another dwarf planet in Pluto's part of space, which is a region known as the Kuiper belt.
A dwarf planet is defined as a world massive enough to be round but still in a part of space where other objects of similar size can cross its orbit, according to NASA. "Major" planets, such as Earth, clear their paths in orbit around the sun.
2015 RR245 is catalogued as the "18th largest" object in the Kuiper belt, according to the Minor Planet Center, the organization responsible for cataloguing these kinds of findings for the international community.
But researchers still don't know much about the dwarf planet in general because of its huge distance from Earth.
Scientists have studied other dwarf planets like Eris, Makemake and 2007 OR10 from Earth to try to understand what the distant worlds might be like. However, last year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, and gathered a treasure trove of data that is still being analyzed.
That marked the the first close-up observations of a world this far from the sun.
Instead of seeing a cold, cratered and rocky world, New Horizons beamed back images revealing Pluto to be a surprisingly geologically active place with ice mountains and expansive, open plains.
It's possible that 2015 RR245 and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt also play host to complex and unexpected geological activity waiting to be explored.
New Horizons is now speeding toward another target in the Kuiper belt, a small object never studied from close range about 1 billion miles from Pluto.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
