Discovery of a new planet in the outer solar systemAugust 02, 2005New Haven, Conn. - A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA, Yale University in New Haven, CT, and Gemini Observatory in Hilo, HI, report the discovery of a new planet in the outer solar system. Officially designated 2003 UB313, the new planet is intrinsically brighter than Pluto and three times farther away. Assuming the reflectivity of the surface is the same as Pluto's, it is the largest object detected in the solar system since the discovery of Neptune and its moon Triton in 1846. The discovery team consists of Michael Brown at Caltech, David Rabinowitz at Yale, and Chad Trujillo at the Gemini Observatory. This is the same team that a year ago announced their discovery of Sedna, a smaller body also at the distant edges of our solar system. The team has since discovered several other Pluto-scale bodies including 2005 FY9 and 2003 EL61, both objects in the outer solar system comparable in size to Pluto but smaller. 2003 EL61 was independently discovered by Spanish astronomers and reported today. All of the new discoveries have been made with the Palomar QUEST camera, a gigantic digital camera built at Yale University and mounted on the 48-inch-diameter telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. With this camera, observers can search the entire northern sky multiple times with greater sensitivity than any other telescope in the world. The Palomar Quest camera is currently being used by researchers at Yale, Caltech, and the University of California at Berkeley to search not only for new planets, but also for supernovae, distant galaxies, and variable stars. 2003 UB313 is currently about 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. The orbital period is close to 560 years. In 280 years, it will be at its closest point, 38 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. The discovery team is currently using the Keck and Gemini Telescopes in Hawaii, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and smaller telescopes in Chile to measure the color, reflectivity, composition, rotation rate, and other properties of 2003 UB313. The observations from Chile already reveal a neutral, grey color typical of large icy bodies in the outer solar system. Observations of the reflected light at infrared wavelengths made with the Gemini telescope reveal the presence of frozen water, methane, and other gasses prevalent in the atmospheres of the outer planets. The Palomar camera, which has over 160 million pixels and 112 CCD detectors, was built for the 48\\\ Yale University |
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| Related Solar System Current Events and Solar System News Articles A bubbling ball of gas The Sun is a bubbling mass. Packages of gas rise and sink, lending the sun its grainy surface structure, its granulation. Dark spots appear and disappear, clouds of matter dart up - and behind the whole thing are the magnetic fields, the engines of it all. UT Knoxville and ORNL researchers turn algae into high-temperature hydrogen source In the quest to make hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel source, researchers have been stymied about how to create usable hydrogen that is clean and sustainable without relying on an intensive, high-energy process that outweighs the benefits of not using petroleum to power vehicles. Follow Rosetta's final Earth boost ESA's comet chaser Rosetta will swing by Earth for the last time on 13 November to pick up energy and begin the final leg of its 10-year journey to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. ESA's European Space Operations Centre will host a media briefing on that day. 'Ultra-primitive' particles found in comet dust Dust samples collected by high-flying aircraft in the upper atmosphere have yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution. A special issue on the International Workshop of the 2008 Solar Total Eclipse On August 1, 2008 a total solar eclipse was visible within a narrow corridor that traversed from North America to China. Physicist makes new high-res panorama of Milky Way Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. A Long Night Falls Over Saturn's Rings As Saturn's rings orbit the planet, a section is typically in the planet's shadow, experiencing a brief night lasting from 6 to 14 hours. However, once approximately every 15 years, night falls over the entire visible ring system for about four days. Satellite reveals surprising cosmic 'weather' at edge of solar system The first solar system energetic particle maps show an unexpected landmark occurring at the outer edge of the solar wind bubble surrounding the solar system. Meteorite from September 25 fireball event recovered and presented When Tony Garchinski heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. on Friday, September 25 he didn't think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom's Nissan Pathfinder with a huge crack in it. Making note of the 'unusual' rocks he later found on the car's hood, Garchinski chalked the incident up to vandalism and filed a police report. IBEX satellite finds ribbon-like structure at edge of heliosphere The invisible structures of space are becoming less so, as scientists look out to the far edges of the solar wind bubble that separates our solar system from the interstellar cloud through which it flies. More Solar System Current Events and Solar System News Articles |
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