Scott Shepherd, extreme object researcher and astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, says, "We went from being able to cover something like a full moon to something that could cover 10 to 12 full moons in a single image."
Just recently, researchers have observed extreme objects by using a couple of telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. The findings were then forwarded to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. The newly-discovered foreign matters likely consist of methane and water ice with some rock. The average diameter is between 200-400 kilometers.
The significance of this investigation is closely affiliated with the search for a heavenly body named Planet Nine, which is supposed to be situated beyond Neptune but within our Solar System.
With Sheppard, Chadwick Trujillo of Northern Arizona University announced the discovery of an object nicknamed Biden in 2014. It has been observed that this matter showed signs of orbiting in cluster, which led to the question what heavenly body did these extreme objects are circumnavigating considering that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are way out of range. Calculations have shown that Planet Nine is 200 times farther from the sun and it is 15 times larger than the earth.
However, Sheppard cautions, "right now, we are dealing with very low-number statistics, so we don't really understand what is happening in the outer Solar System. Greater numbers of extreme trans-Neptunian objects must be found to fully determine its structure. The peculiar clustering of the objects beyond Neptune has only a 0.007% chance, or about one in 15,000, that this circumstance is just a coincidence.
According to Professor Mike Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, the declassification of Pluto has propelled the mysterious world to be identified as Planet Nine.
