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Astronomers have discovered a new PINK planet on the edge of our Solar System.

The dwarf planet - given the name 2012 VP 113 by scientists - is 80 times further from the Sun than Earth.

It is 280 miles in diameter and is in a distant area of the Solar System way beyond Pluto once thought to contain no planets at all.

The pink-tinged lump of ice and rock circles the sun at a greater distance than any known object, never getting closer than 12bn km (7bn miles).

The object - dubbed ‘VP’ or ‘Biden’ after the US Vice President - is only the second to be found in a mysterious region at the boundary between the Solar System and outer space called the inner Oort Cloud.

Astronomers now believe there may be thousands of previously unknown objects orbiting the Sun at this distance.

And they believe that the pattern of the new planet’s orbit suggests it is caused by the gravitational pull of a ‘Super Earth’ that traces such a large orbit around the Sun that it has never been seen.

Astronomer Scott Sheppard, who found the new planet with colleague Chad Trujillo, said: “If you took a Super Earth and put it a few hundred astronomical units out, the gravity could shepherd this new object into the orbit it has.”

An astronomical unit is around 150 million kilometres (93 million miles).

The traditional view of the Solar System had been that of nine planets orbiting the Sun.

This was overturned in the 1990s when scientists found that Pluto is orbiting in a band of thousands of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt.

Beyond this belt only one object - another dwarf planet called Sedna - was thought to exist on its own.

But the latest discovery suggests that our Solar System has a number of planets at its edges.

Professor Andrew Coates, Head of Planetary Science at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: “This looks like a very exciting result giving a glimpse of what the inner Oort Cloud might tell us.

“This represents the real edge of the solar system, with objects in orbit around the Sun up to a quarter of the way to the nearest star.

“But the inner Oort Cloud is more difficult to detect, and the new result gives us a taste - including the possibility of planet-sized, previously undetected objects. We will have to wait for more results to find out for sure.”

Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, said: “There’s something joyous in the fact there are still things to be discovered.”