Pluto isn't lonely anymore. This after scientists at the University of Michigan discovered new distant dwarf planet orbiting near our solar system, around 8.5 billion miles from the Sun.
The dwarf planet, also known as 2014 UZ224, is the third most remote object in the solar system so far. It takes 1,100 years to complete its orbit around the sun. It's located far beyond the gravitational influence of Neptune in the area of the Kuiper Belt.
Professors Arthur F. Thurnau and David Gerdes' team at Michigan University discovered 2014 UZ224. Gerdes had helped with the buildout of the Dark Energy Camera that helps in mapping the movement of distant galaxies.
A few years ago, Gerdes asked undergraduates to find nearby unidentified solar system objects in the galaxy map.
In this research, Connect-the-dot style technique was used, where the immovable galaxies and stars were constant in their position, and the planet or asteroids will be moving to complete its orbit. This pattern helped in creating connect-the -dot style photograph that helped in calculating the objects' orbit around the sun.
The discovery of 2014 UZ224 is quite interesting because the pictures taken by Gerdes weren't taken in following nights but roughly once per week.
In an interview with NPR, he 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."
This is indeed a significant discovery, and may surely reveal a lot of facts about our solar system in the coming days.
