‘It’s big’: Astronomers make startling discovery of a possible dwarf planet beyond Pluto - CNN

Astronomers have spotted a new dwarf planet candidate in the solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto, which they provisionally named ED138. If future observations confirm the discovery, ED138 will join a group currently made up of five dwarf planets that have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union, or IAU: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. The finding is the result of detections made by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new telescope that sits atop a 2,682-meter-tall (8,800-foot-tall) mountain in Chile and houses the world’s largest digital camera. The telescope started operating in 2025 and is capable of imaging the entire sky every three days. Matthew Holman, a Smithsonian senior astrophysicist and lecturer in astronomy at Harvard University, ran a computer program he codeveloped to comb through data collected by Rubin earlier in 2026, scanning billions of detections of moving objects.