The universe has a way of surprising even its most ardent observers. Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., was scheduled to give a lecture on what was the furthest known object in the solar system. And then, just a day before his scheduled talk, he discovered an even further one. "This is hot off the presses," Shepard said on February 21. "Yesterday it snowed so I had nothing to do, so I went looking through some of our data." And then, aha. The newly discovered object is called, appropriately, Farfarout. It replaces Farout as the furthest known object in our solar system. The previous record holder orbited the sun at about 120 AU (one AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from the Earth to the sun). Farfarout is a stunning 140 AU away. Objects at this distance lie within the Kuiper Belt and are known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The nearest familiar object to FarFarOut is Pluto, which is vast in comparison. Pluto is 1,400