Scott Sander Sheppard (born 1977) is an American astronomer and a discoverer of numerous moons, comets and minor planets in the outer Solar System.
[4][better source needed] Starting as a graduate student at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he was credited with the discovery of many small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
These discoveries showed that the Neptune trojan objects are mostly on highly inclined orbits and thus likely captured small bodies from elsewhere in the Solar System.
[1] Sheppard was the lead discoverer of the object with the most distant orbit known in the Solar System, 2012 VP113 (nicknamed Biden).
In 2018, the announcement of the high perihelion inner Oort cloud object 541132 Leleākūhonua (nicknamed "The Goblin") by Sheppard et al., being only the third known after 2012 VP113 and Sedna, further demonstrated that a super-Earth planet in the distant solar system likely exists as Leleākūhonua has many orbital similarities as the two other known inner Oort cloud objects.