Farfarout almost didn’t seem real at first. It was very faint even through the lens of three telescopes — from the original observations of the Subaru 8-meter telescope perched on the top of Maunakea in Hawaii, to the follow-ups with Gemini North and Magellan. Astronomer Chad Trujillo was part of the team that proved this not-quite-planet was for real. “We had a strong suspicion that it was real just from the initial discovery images,” Trujillo told SYFY WIRE. “Although you can see there's a lot of noise in the images, if you look carefully, Farfarout is faint and looks a lot like some of the fainter background stars, except that it's moving between the images we observed. When we look at this motion, it seems to be at a speed and direction that is consistent with a real solar system object orbiting the Sun, which is not true of anything else in the images.”