Astronomers Were Looking for Planet Nine when this Guy Showed Up in the Telescope Image

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Head to https://squarespace.com/territory to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TERRITORY Research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806 Astronomers have just identified what could be a new dwarf planet using observations from the Dark Energy Camera in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The discovery wasn’t made through a single lucky image, but by carefully analyzing seven years of archival data, which revealed nineteen separate detections, enough to reconstruct its orbit. And once they mapped it out, they found the object follows an extreme orbit. 2017 OF201 travels in a long elliptical path around the Sun. At its closest, it comes in at about 44.5 astronomical units, just a bit beyond Pluto. But at its farthest? It swings out past 1,600 AU. For scale, that’s over 50 times farther than Neptune. One orbit takes about 25,000 years. That’s not just far. That’s outer Oort Cloud territory! 0:00 Discovery of 2017 OF201 6:25 Is that Planet 9? Become a member to support our work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8SGU9hQEaJpsLuggAhS90Q/join When you buy from our store, you support us: https://my-store-10522d3.creator-spring.com/ Subscribe to Territory - https://www.youtube.com/@territoryspace/featured Instagram - instagram.com/territoryspace