Scott S Sheppard from Carnegie Institution for Science along with David J Tholen from University of Hawaií and Chadwick Trujillo have made discovery of two new worlds outside the orbit of Neptune.
This latest finding came when scientists undertook the deepest survey ever to find the distant objects in the solar system through observation made with Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) telescope in Chile.
The objects exist beyond the Kuiper Belt, which is known as a region of small icy objects beyond Neptune. The newly discovered objects have the third and fourth most-distant perihelia making the object have the closest approach distance to the sun.
Even though it is located at a distant from the ice planet but the orbital motions of these objects are by Neptune’s orbit. These circumstances make the researchers believe that either the newly discovered objects have in the past also interacted with Neptune, or they are presently doing so.
The newly discovered objects are all located close to Neptune’s Mean Motion Resonances which means that the objects have specific period ratios with respect to the cold planet. So whenever Neptune goes around the Sun four times, the newly discovered objects goes around the Sun once. On the other hand, the other objects go around once whenever Neptune goes around the Sun three times.
It is not the first time that scientists have discovered something new. Way back in 2014, the same team predicted the existence of a Super-Earth-mass planet orbiting at some distance away from the Sun. Before finding this object, there was information about only one object which was known to have a low-to-moderate semi-major axis.
The latest finding was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.