Los Angeles, Oct 07: Peering out one billion miles beyond Pluto, astronomers have discovered a frozen world 800 miles (1,287 kms) across in what marks the biggest find in the solar system since the ninth planet was spotted 72 years ago. The object is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles (6 billion kms). It's half Pluto's size but apparently larger than the planet's moon, Charon.
"It's about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big," said planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Brown and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo discovered the frozen world in images taken on June 4. They were to announce their discovery today in Birmingham, Alabama, at a meeting of the American astronomical society's division of planetary sciences.
The two used a telescope at the Palomar observatory near San Diego to discover the world, provisionally dubbed Quaoar (pronounced kwah-o-wahr), a creation force in southern California Indian mythology. Follow-up observations with the hubble space telescope confirmed its size. Archival research showed Quaoar had been captured on film as long ago as 1982, but was never noticed, Brown said. He and Trujillo went back and pored over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun. "It could easily have been detected 20 years ago, but it wasn't," Brown said.
Bureau Report