Researchers discover dwarf planet

Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - 19:49 StudyHall.Rocks

An artist's concept of objects in the Kuiper Belt.

Not that it’s the sort of place you would ever want to visit, but there is something exciting about the discovery of a new dwarf planet -- right in our own backyard.

An object believed to be a dwarf planet and known as 2014 UZ224 has been discovered by astronomers surveying images from a Dark Energy Camera on a telescope in Chile, according to the website of David Gerdes, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan. The project's goal is to understand why the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating. Here are the basics:

A far-flung location: The dwarf planet is in the region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. Right now, it is more than 90 astronomical units or 14 billion kilometers from the sun, the website pointed out. Consider that Earth is one astronomical unit from the sun.

A true dwarf: What is the planet's size? Researchers are not sure but give an estimated diameter of 350 to 1,200 kilometers (217 to 745 miles). They are still working with images to get an exact sense of the size. Last year, the New Horizons spacecraft determined that the diameter of Pluto was 2,370 kilometers or 1,473 miles. Before the newly discovered object is officially declared a dwarf planet, researchers must make sure it meets International Astronomical Union requirements. For example, it must orbit the sun. (It does, according to Gerdes’s webpage. In fact, the dwarf planet takes 1,136 Earth years to orbit the sun.) It also must be round and cannot be a satellite, such as the moon.

Will it have a name? The first five recognized dwarf planets in the solar system all have names. They are Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake, according to NASA. This newly spotted dwarf planet could get a snappier moniker. On his website, Gerdes points out that the International Astronomical Union allows the discoverer to propose a name for the dwarf planet only when the object’s orbit is “sufficiently well-determined.” (See our article about how planets are named.)

Are there other dwarfs? As put on the University of Michigan website, the project has discovered 50 “trans-Neptunian planets.”

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