It’s been just four months since the Vera C. Rubin Observatory officially began its decade-long survey of the cosmos , and it’s already exceeding expectations . Rubin’s latest find—an icy world orbiting the Sun at a distance farther than Pluto—may be our solar system’s sixth dwarf planet. What’s more, this candidate appears to be among the largest and brightest objects ever discovered in this region of our cosmic neighborhood.

“Finding an object this big, roughly 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] across, is something that happens maybe once in a generation,” Mario Jurić, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and leader of Rubin’s solar system team, said in a statement.…