science

2026 ED138 is way out beyond Neptune and perhaps the smallest known object of its type

A scientist working on data gathered by the Rubin Observatory has found a strong candidate for our solar system’s sixth known dwarf planet.

The Observatory is run by the USA’s National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, who built it on a remote hilltop in Chile and equipped it with the 3200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, which came online in June 2026.

As explained in a Tuesday announcement , Rubin Operations team member and project contributor Matthew Holman, of the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard & Smithsonian, used search code he developed with CfA colleague Kevin Napier to analyze data captured before LSST operations commenced.

The Observatory says Holman’s and Napier’s code “is built to look at billions of detections of moving objects, compare them, and find the detections that correspond to the same object.”

On October 13, the code spotted an object so bright…