Astronomers may have just identified a rare example of a "three-body problem" hiding in plain sight beyond the solar system's most distant planet. If the observation can be confirmed, it suggests that many more cosmic triplets could be hiding in the outer reaches of our cosmic neighborhood, researchers say.
Back in 2001, astronomers discovered what they thought was a binary system made up of two large bodies orbiting each other approximately 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth in the Kuiper Belt — a ring of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets, including Pluto, that lies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
