A scrawny dwarf planet nicknamed the Goblin has been discovered well beyond Pluto. This 300 kilometer wide, round frozen world was first spotted by a team of astronomers in Hawaii using the Subaru Telescope in the October of 2015, thus justifying its Halloween-themed name. But it wasn’t publicly unveiled by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center after veriiying the discovery following further observations with ground telescopes. The Goblin is officially known as 2015 TG387. It is the third dwarf planet to be recently discovered orbiting the sun on the desolate fringes of our solar system, the Goblin was spotted by a team of astronomers – Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and David Tholen from the University of Hawaii – when it was fairly close to the sun, nearly 80 AU. The other two discoveries are the dwarf planets Sedna, an icy world 1000 kilometers across discovered in 2003, and 2012 VP 113. These discoveries were made by some of the same people on the team of Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution. In a statement made at the University of Hawaii, David Tholen commented that they could only observe 2015 TG387 when it was near its closest approach to the sun.
The team stumbled upon the Goblin in their pursuit of the hypothetical Planet X.
