New dwarf planet discovered far beyond Pluto's orbit

Pluto isn't quite as lonely as scientists had thought.

Astronomers have discovered another dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. But this newfound world, dubbed 2015 RR245, is much more distant than Pluto, orbiting the sun once every 700 Earth years, scientists said. (Pluto completes one lap around the sun every 248 Earth years.) You can see an animation of the new dwarf planet's orbit here.

"The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun," discovery team member Michele Bannister, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said in a statement. "They let us piece together the history of our solar system."

"But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint; it's really exciting to find one that's large and bright enough that we can study it in detail," Bannister added.

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