Space is vast, with trillions of objects in it, so it’s not necessarily a surprise when scientists find new objects there, even if it’s sometimes entirely by accident . Some objects are scarcer than others, and dwarf planets in our solar system are among the rarest, with only five recognized examples. A group of researchers from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory may have just found a sixth.

Meet ED138, a dwarf planet candidate. It was found earlier in October when Rubin Operations team member Matthew Holman noted an unusually large object uncovered by a program he’d written with colleague Kevin Napier to scan Rubin Observatory data for moving objects.

“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Holman said in a statement . “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”

Holman ran the search a second time through archived data and found the same object 20 more times dating back to March 2026.…