Nearly 140 new minor planets found at edge of solar system: Study

Astronomers have discovered 139 new trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) -- minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system.

The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, also describes a new approach for finding similar types of objects, and could aid future searches for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered planets.

"The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what's the faintest thing you can find," said Gary Bernstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

Using the first four years of data from Dark Energy Survey (DES), graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli started with a dataset of seven billion "dots," all of the possible objects detected by the software that were above the image's background levels.

He then removed any objects that were present on multiple nights -- things like stars, galaxies, and supernova -- to build a "transient" list of 22 million objects before commencing a massive game of "connect the dots."