Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a new dwarf planet in our Solar System, finding a distant object beyond Neptune that circles the Sun in a spectacularly wide orbit.

Dubbed 2015 RR245 by the International Astronomical Union while they come up with a better name, the dwarf planet is about 700 kilometres in diameter, and its elongated orbit sends it out some 120 times further from the Sun than Earth. So it's a pretty distant neighbor.

Astronomers are finding more of these dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt all the time, but even so RR245 stands out for its size and orbit. In fact, the scientists who found it – as part of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) – say it's the largest OSSOS discovery to date, of more than 500 trans-Neptunian objects identified by the Survey.

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