On October 28, 2026, the Vera Rubin Observatory's 3,200-megapixel camera flagged 2026 ED138 — a bright object orbiting far beyond Pluto that may be one of the largest worlds ever found at the solar system's edge.
The announcement itself: on Oct 28, 2026 the IAU Minor Planet Center logged 2026 ED138, a bright trans-Neptunian object and Rubin's first dwarf planet candidate.
How the object surfaced in Rubin images taken between March and July 2026, and why it was hard to spot against a crowded star field about 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth.
Perched on a Chilean mountaintop and named for the astronomer who found evidence of dark matter, Rubin is built to image the entire southern sky every few nights.
Rubin's debut shots revealed millions of galaxies and 2,000+ new asteroids in just hours. See what a 3.2-gigapixel eye on the cosmos actually produces.
The LSST will photograph the sky repeatedly for a decade, catalogue billions of objects, and flag anything that moves or changes — the machine that makes finds like ED138 routine.
To understand what ED138 is, you need the 2006 vote that redefined 'planet' and created a whole new category Pluto was dropped into.
Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disc — thousands of icy bodies, most still undiscovered, that preserve the solar system's deep-frozen origins.
Odd clustering in distant orbits hints at a hidden planet far out in the dark. Rubin is exactly the instrument that could finally find it — or rule it out.