A Strange Orbiting Object

What is 200 kilometers in diameter, located outside the plane of the solar system, and orbits the sun is a direction opposed to everything else in the solar system? Your guess is really as good as anyone else's at this point since scientists are baffled.

This trans-Neptunian object (TNO) is the subject of a New Scientist article that reports on recent findings from the Pan-STARRS 1 Outer Solar System Survey.  The paper associated with this discovery (titled "Discovery of A New Retrograde Trans-Neptunian Object: Hint of A Common Orbital Plane for Low Semi-Major Axis, High Inclination TNOs and Centaurs") labels the newly discovered NTO "Niku" (Chinese for "rebellious").

The article goes on to ponder the cause, be be it billiards among the planets or the mysterious Planet Nine. Just a quick hint - Planet Nine is not a suspect.

It seems we have plenty more to discover about our neighborhood. Who says there's nothing new under the sun (or orbiting it)?

A New Planet in Our Solar System?

The Orlando Sentinel recently reported on a distant object that appears to be in our solar system, yet its identity is unclear and it could be one of three things:

A TNO, or Trans-Neptunian Object (like Pluto), which is any body that orbits the sun beyond Neptune; a Super-Earth, meaning bigger than Earth but smaller than the gas giants like Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune or Uranus; or a very cool brown dwarf, which is what some scientists refer to as a failed star - bigger than Jupiter, but not big enough to produce the fusion necessary to become a star.

That is certainly a wide range of possibilities.  Scientists with the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, and SE-439 92 Onsala, Sweden published a paper that stated:

The obvious question then is, what is its nature and why has it escaped earlier detection? Is it always too close to the binary? Is it too cold? In that case, i.e., at temperatures below a hundred Kelvin or so, the non-detection at shorter wavelengths, with e.g.WISE, would be reconcilable.

Good questions that other scientists will be very eager to answer.