Scientists Have Discovered A Mysterious Object Located On The Outskirts Of The Solar System, And While

There's an unidentified object in a strange orbit past Neptune, and no one can explain it

The outer Solar System just got even weirder.

Scientists have discovered a mysterious object located on the outskirts of the Solar System, and while we don’t know much about it yet, what we do know doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Nicknamed Niku, it appears to be a trans-Neptunian object, which means it’s a minor planet that exists past Neptune. But that’s where things start to get a little strange.

While there are lots of minor planets that we know about – ie. objects smaller than planets that aren’t comets – and scientists are finding more all the time, Niku doesn’t behave like the rest of them.

For starters, Niku orbits the Sun on a plane that’s tilted 110 degrees to the plane of the Solar System – the flat orbital disk in which the planets move around the Sun. It’s currently above the plane and rising higher, but it will eventually start lowering as it orbits back around.

Weirder still, while nearly all the objects in our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same direction – called the prograde direction – Niku bucks the trend, with a retrograde (or backwards) orbit of the Sun.

It’s not the first time a trans-Neptunian object has been discovered with a retrograde orbit, but when you combine it with Niku’s orbital tilt, it becomes clear that there’s something very unusual about this minor planet.

“It suggests that there’s more going on in the outer Solar System than we’re fully aware of,” astrophysicist Matthew Holman from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics explained to Shannon Hall at New Scientist.

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