Our Solar System

The sun is so remote from this place that it appears no brighter than a star. This is the Kuiper belt, a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects that is one of the most mysterious — and one of the most scientifically intriguing — regions of space around our sun.

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For decades, researchers have dreamed of getting a close-up look at one but have been thwarted by the utter remoteness of the Kuiper belt. But this sad state of scientific ignorance is about to come to an end. On 1 January, the US probe New Horizons — which has been hurtling away from the sun for the past 13 years — will sweep past Kuiper belt object MU69 and, for the next 24 hours, use its cameras, detectors and scanners to scrutinise this little world in detail.

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Does it have an atmosphere? Does it have rings? Who knows what we might find. In the process, MU69 will become the most distant object that has ever been explored remotely by human beings. It should be a remarkable encounter — a point recognised by mission control staff who recently decided to give the little world a title that is more memorable than its current drab astronomical catalogue number.

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They have renamed it Ultima Thule — after the region that ancient geographers believed was the remotest in the inhabited world. Both Greenland and Iceland are candidates for the original location of Ultima Thule. Then it will start to beam its findings back to Earth to provide scientists with that precious data about the early history of our solar system. Then, having completed its historic task, New Horizons will plunge further into deep space in the rough direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral in January and used a flyby of the giant planet Jupiter in February to increase its velocity to more than 30,mph.

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For the next eight years it hurtled outwards from the sun towards its primary target: The robot spacecraft eventually completed its 3bn-mile journey to Pluto and its moons on 14 July , and began beaming back data to Earth, messages that took more than four hours to reach mission control even though this information was being transmitted at the speed of light. And the information revealed by these signals when they eventually reached Earth provided astronomers with a number of surprises.

Many had expected Pluto and its moons would be revealed to be icy, dead places. The planet had towering water-ice mountains and vast plains of frozen nitrogen, while a reddish-brown cap of material on Charon was found to be composed of organic molecules that could be important ingredients of life. Pluto was also discovered to have a thin, blue atmosphere rich in nitrogen.

For a world in such a remote orbit around the sun, the planet — and its moons — proved to be surprisingly energetic. We thought Pluto would have lost its geothermal energy long ago, but that is not the case. However, it was the response of the public that most excited Stern.

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It was the first fly-by of a new planet to have taken place since the 80s and people were really enthusiastic about it. They were really gripped by the discoveries we made. The public is really interested in space exploration. And that has encouraged us. Having revealed the wonders of Pluto and its moons, New Horizons then continued on its path and headed into the Kuiper belt, an additional trip that would add a further 1bn miles to its travel history. Studying these little worlds would be a very different affair from scrutinising Pluto or Charon, however. The discovery team nicknamed the object "Farout," and its provisional designation from the International Astronomical Union is VG Preliminary research suggests it's a round, pinkish dwarf planet.

The same team spotted a faraway dwarf planet nicknamed "The Goblin" in October.

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The object is more than 3. The record Farout now holds is for the most-distant solar system body ever observed.

That doesn't mean no other objects gets farther away from the sun than AU. In fact, we know some that do.

Solar System

The dwarf planet Sedna gets more than AU away on its highly elliptical orbit, for example, and there are probably trillions of comets in the Oort Cloud, which lies between about 5, AU and , AU from the sun. Farout was first spotted using the Subaru 8-meter telescope in Hawaii in November, and then a follow-up measurement in early December by the Magellan telescope in Chile confirmed its existence.

According to those observations, the object is likely about km across, which would mean it's spherical and a dwarf planet. Its pinkish color suggests it's an ice-rich body, according to the statement. The research team is scoping out these ultradistant objects to search for the gravitational influence of a theorized super-Earth-size Planet Nine, also called Planet X, that researchers have posited orbits in the extreme reaches of the solar system.

The movements of several distant bodies have suggested the existence of this planet , which would be extremely faint and hard to locate. The orbital similarities shown by many of the known small, distant solar system bodies was the catalyst for our original assertion that there is a distant, massive planet at several hundred AU shepherding these smaller objects.