Cool Discovery
Another Incredibly Distant Member of the Solar System
Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from the Sun! That’s 80 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. No other solar system object known stays so far from the Sun. And at its most distant, it reaches an incredible 70 billion kilometers (44 billion miles) from the Sun-and it takes well over 4,000 years to circle the Sun once.
EDIT: See also A second Sedna! What does it mean?