Tiny planet spotted, 3x as distant as Pluto

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The first images look interesting:

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I’m not usually pedantic about this sort of thing, but a “planet”? Not so much. 500km is about the same size as the asteroid Ceres. Still very cool.

True. Big pieces of space debris are why they carved out the category ‘dwarf planet’. Current guesstimate puts the total number of dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt at 200, a 1000 including the Ort cloud. Try memorizing all of those.

Another Kuiper object? Wonder what name they would give this one.

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Apparently, Rob isn’t excited by the name “V774104”.

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I’ve never heard of the Subaru telescope, and I’m surprised, after a little wiki-ing, it seems to have no connection to the auto maker, except they both like the Pleiades.

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And much less massive? They should really call these things “comets.”

Here’s a Hubble close-up of the planet:

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It must be very accurate to not only see the planet, but to see that it is spotted as well.

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I think Rob’s “Tiny Planet” was a joke on the actual nomenclature, Dwarf Planet.

Ceres is also a Dwarf Planet, not an asteroid.

These two, and the hundreds of other Dwarf Planets, while tiny, are still massive enough to form themselves into a sphere under their own gravity.

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Sedna, another dwarf planet, is currently about 2 x as fas away from the sun as Pluto is. However, it has a very eccentric orbit. At its furthest, if may be 15 x as far from the sun as Pluto. V774104 may behave similarly, but there isn’t much know about its orbit quite yet.

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Yuggoth?

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Since Voyager is apparently only 4x (this body, at 3x, is 3/4 as far as Voyager) as far out as Pluto, what does this say about the size of the solar system?

that space is big?

The current theories about the Oort cloud of the solar system predict a sun/cloud edge distance of 100000 AU.

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