A new planet?
Friday, February 20th 2004
Astronomers said Thursday they have found a frozen object 4.4
billion miles from Earth that appears to be more than half the size
of Pluto and larger than the planet's moon.
If confirmed, the so-called planetoid would become the largest
object found in our solar system since the ninth planet was first
spied in 1930.
Preliminary observations suggest the frozen celestial body is 10
percent larger than Quaoar, an 800-mile-diameter object found in
2002.
"Right now it looks like it could be bigger than Quaoar, which would
put it bigger than anything since Pluto," said Mike Brown, a California
Institute of Technology astronomer.
Brown and colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in
Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, discovered the object late Monday
with a telescope at the Palomar Observatory outside San Diego.
The object, dubbed 2004 DW, lies at the outer fringes of the Kuiper
Belt, a swarm of frozen rock and ice beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Pluto is the largest known Kuiper Belt object, although it's
traditionally considered a planet. Its moon, Charon, is about 800 miles across.
The newfound frozen world is the 15th object larger than 300 miles
in diameter found in the region.
Preliminary measurements suggest the object follows an elliptical
orbit that takes it as close as 2.7 billion miles to the sun and as far
out as 4.7 billion miles, said Brown. It takes the object an estimated
252 years to orbit the sun.
- CNN