Astronomers have found a new planet orbiting our Sun. The
new-discovered icy, reddish body is between 595 and 788
miles across, around the size of Pluto?s moon Charon. It has
been named 2001 KX76 for now. ?When we spotted it, we
just wrote 'wow' on the image,? says co-discoverer Dr
Lawrence Wasserman of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff,
Arizona. ?We knew right away it was a big one.?
It was found during a deep space survey that was looking for
bodies circling the Sun out near Pluto, the most distant
planet. There may be even larger objects out there, bigger
than planet Pluto itself, still awaiting discovery. ?We have
every reason to believe that objects ranging up to planets as
large or larger than Pluto are out there waiting to be found,?
says Wasserman. ?What we have seen may be only the tip of
the iceberg.?
2001 KX76 was discovered in the course of the Deep Ecliptic
Survey, a NASA-funded study. It was seen on May 22nd in
deep digital images of the southern sky taken with the Blanco
Telescope at Cerro Tololo in Chile. Astronomers estimate that
it is currently at a distance of just over 4 billion miles from
the Sun. The detailed shape of its orbit remains uncertain,
but evidence suggests that it may be in an orbital dance with
Neptune, orbiting the Sun three times for each time that
Neptune completes four orbits.
?The excitement of this is that it?s a new frontier: There is a
region in the solar system beyond Neptune that is populated
with a large number of objects and we have no idea of what
we may ultimately discover there,? says Robert Millis, director
of the Lowell Observatory.
?We're inching up to Pluto,? says Dr. David Jewitt of the
University of Hawaii. ?It is just a matter of time until we see
Pluto 2, Pluto 3, and so on.?
For more information, click here, and click here.
