(Washington Post) A previously unknown dwarf planet circles through the far reaches of our solar system, the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced Tuesday. Officially designated 2015 TG387, the small and spherical object is probably a ball of ice. Astronomers first observed the dwarf planet on Oct. 13, 2015, from the Subaru telescope at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea Observatories. Embracing the near-Halloween October spirit —
and for want of something pronounceable — its discoverers nicknamed 2015 TG387 “the Goblin.” The Goblin is “about 300 kilometers in diameter, on the small end of a dwarf planet,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington who discovered the object along with colleagues at Northern Arizona University, University of Hawaii and the University of Oklahoma. Dwarf planet Pluto, by comparison, is six times as wide. READ MORE
