The Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced its first dwarf planet candidate on Oct. 27: an icy world provisionally named 2026 ED138, out beyond Pluto.
What they found
Matthew Holman of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found it on Oct. 13 while running Rubin data through a search code he wrote with Kevin Napier. It’s about 46 AU from the Sun (Pluto averages 40), and the team estimates it’s 600 to 1,500 km across. Rubin caught it 30 times on 20 nights between March and July, and older Dark Energy Camera images trace its orbit back to 2016. It hid this long because it sits near the plane of the Milky Way, lost among millions of stars. Infrared observations still need to confirm its size and shape before it can join Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake.
My take
A whole world out there, unnamed by us until this month, and God knew it the whole time. “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name” (Psalm 147:4). The bigger our telescopes get, the bigger He looks.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
