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, Brown said. It takes the object an estimated 252 years to orbit the sun. |