A team of scientists conducting a survey of an area beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt has observed never-before-detected objects at extreme distances from the sun, in the process improving their chances of locating the much-speculated-upon ninth planet of the solar system.

Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Northern Arizona University’s Chadwick Trujillo have been working with University of Hawaii astronomer David Tholen to find and confirm extremely distant objects and to analyze whether the discoveries align with existing theories of how interactions with a massive distant planet could have shaped the outer reaches of the solar system.

The scientists have been using highly advanced telescopes, including the Dark Energy Camera on the NOAO 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile and the Japanese Hyper Suprime-Cam on the 8-meter Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea.

According to Sheppard and Trujillo, the more objects found at extreme distances, the better the chance of locating the ninth planet they believe to exist beyond Pluto at a distance more than 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun. They suspect the proposed planet’s powerful gravity affects the movements of smaller objects beyond Neptune.

“Objects found far beyond Neptune hold the key to unlocking our solar system’s origins and evolution,” Sheppard said in a news release issued Monday. “Though we believe there are thousands of these small objects, we haven’t found very many of them yet because they are so far away.

“The smaller objects can lead us to the much bigger planet we think exists out there,” he said. “The more we discover, the better we will be able to understand what is going on in the outer solar system.”

One of the objects discovered, 2014 FE72, is the first distant Oort Cloud object found with an orbit entirely beyond Neptune. (The Oort Cloud is a spherical body composed of icy objects that exists in the outer solar system.) It is thought that because its orbit takes it so far from the sun, 2014 FE72 is likely being influenced by gravitational forces outside the solar system.