Mystery Object Lies On Fringes Of Our Solar System

There's a mystery object in a strange orbit beyond Neptune that cannot be explained.

The object sits beyond the most distant planet in our solar system, and could be less than 120 miles in diameter.

It is an oddity because it is above the plane of the solar system and moving upwards every day.
Its plane is 110 degrees to the plane of the solar system, and swings the opposite way around the sun to other objects.

Because of these features, the team that discovered it call it Niku, which means rebellious in Chinese.
Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queens University, Belfast, tweeted: "I hope everyone has buckled their seatbelts because the outer solar system just got a lot weirder."
A flat plane is a signature of a planetary system, which makes Niku's movements so unique.

It could have been knocked off course by something else, but scientists aren't quite sure.
Matthew Holman, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, told the New Scientist: "It suggests that there's more going on in the outer solar system than we're fully aware of."

Niku is around 160,000 times fainter than Neptune and astronomers reckon it is around 11-times smaller than dwarf planet Pluto.
It orbits about 3.25 billion miles from the sun, and is known as a trans-Neptunian object.
These objects are so far from the sun that the gravitational pull of other gas giants can affect their synchronisation with the rest of the solar system.

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