A possible new dwarf planet hid in the Milky Way's glare — and in photo archives going back to 1937

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has barely begun its ten-year survey of the sky and has already catalogued more than 1,000 newly discovered objects beyond Neptune. The brightest of them, catalogued as 2026 ED138, is the ninth-brightest object of its kind ever found — bright enough for skilled amateurs to spot — and depending on how reflective its surface is, it could span more than 700 kilometres (about 435 miles), large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. Once astronomers knew where to look, they found the same world recorded in observatory archives as far back as 1937.