In 2006, Ceres – located in our solar system’s main asteroid belt – was officially classified as a Dwarf Planet.

This title refers to a body which is smaller than a planet, with many of the same attributes, but hasn’t cleared its orbit of other objects or debris – and with Pluto, Haumea, Eris and Makemake alongside it as the five dwarf planets in our solar system, Ceres is in good company.

Excitingly, a team of scientists has recently discovered a new object in space which could potentially become named as our solar system’s sixth dwarf planet, should it fulfil certain conditions after its observation.

And their recently publicised discovery has space enthusiasts thrilled for more reasons too, with the potential Dwarf Planet breaking new ground when it comes to the location of these celestial bodies.

Known as 2017 OF201, the body is currently classified as a trans-Neptunian object, or a TNO. This means that the newly discovered celestial body is a minor planet that orbits the sun at a greater distance than Neptune.

But what makes this TNO really special is that it is very large, and follows and extreme orbit of 25,000 years, as Siaho Cheng – one of a small team who discovered 2017 OF201 – explained in a statement:

“The object’s aphelion—the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun—is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit. Meanwhile, its perihelion—the closest point on its orbit to the Sun—is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto’s orbit.”

Meanwhile the TNO is thought to measure 700km in diameter, making it extremely large for something with such a massive orbit.

It seems astounding that something so large could have been undetected for so long, but there is a reason for this.

Firstly, the TNO is located beyond the Kuiper Belt (an icy region of space beyond Neptune’s orbit, in which all of the current Dwarf Planets except for Ceres are located), in an area in which little was thought to exist.

Cheng and his team used software and algorithms he designed specifically for this purpose, to identify planets and bodies in the outer solar system, along with images from the Victor M. Blanco Telescope and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.

Through their analysis of the images, the researchers found that 2017 OF201 was only visible in a total of nineteen images, which were captured over a total of seven years. As Cheng continues, there’s a good explanation for its elusiveness:

“2017 OF201 spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable. The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now. Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system.”

As science and technology continues to develop, we can only wonder what will be discovered next.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.