A new face has been added to the solar system’s family portrait, Scientists have discovered a new dwarf planet looping around the sun in the region beyond Pluto. The dwarf planet, called 2014 UZ224, measures about 330 miles (530 kilometers) across and is located about 8.5 billion miles (13.7 billion km) from the sun, on Oct. 11.

• For comparison, Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is about 750 miles (1,200 km) in diameter, and reaches a maximum distance of about 4.5 billion miles (7.3 billion km) from the sun.
• David Gerdes, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan, told NPR that the new dwarf planet was discovered using an instrument called the Dark Energy Camera (DECam).
• The universe is not only expanding but accelerating in that expansion, and “dark energy” is the name scientists have given the mechanism powering that expansion.
• The DECam was built to observe the movement of galaxies and supernovas (exploding stars) as they move away from the Earth. The goal is to provide more clues that will help reveal what dark energy actually is or where it comes from.
• A project called the Dark Energy Survey is using observations from the DEC am to create a map of the universe that provides information relevant to the study of dark energy.
• The DES maps have already been used to study dark matter (which makes up about eighty percent of all the mass in the universe but whose exact nature is still a mystery) and to find previously unidentified objects.