Scientists have identified a celestial body discovered a decade ago to be a dwarf planet, but its orbit exceeds Pluto.

According to NBC News, dwarf planet Sedna is part of a class of several new planetary bodies discovered in the outer reaches of the solar system. Like Sedna, the newly discovered 2012 VP113 is believed to be part of something bigger that is orbiting the sun from tens of billions of miles away.

"This is definitely an evolving field that hopefully will start to get a lot more interesting," Scott Sheppard, one of the Carnegie Institution of Science astronomers responsible for the discovery, told NBC News.

Scientists first spotted Sedna orbiting at the most distant reaches of the solar system in 2004 and thought there had to be more objects like it. 10 years later, 2012 VP113 appeared.

The researchers' study will be published Thursday in the journal Nature. 2012 VP 113 resides in an area known as the inner Oort cloud.

"The search for these distant inner Oort cloud objects beyond Sedna and 2012 VP113 should continue, as they could tell us a lot about how our Solar System formed and evolved," Sheppard said in a press release. "Some of these inner Oort cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth. This is because many of the inner Oort cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology."

The study was mostly based on observations made with telescopes in Chile, but Chad Trujilo, an astronomer with the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, co-authored the study with Sheppard.

"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," he told Space.com. "They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually know about the solar system."