Object Lesson: Pluto's Smallest Neighbors Prove Tough to Find
Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 15:49
in Astronomy & Space
For decades Pluto, later joined by its moon Charon, had a wide swath to itself on astronomers' plots of the solar system--no other bodies were known to dwell beyond Neptune in the long-hypothesized debris field known as the Kuiper Belt. But in 1992 a pair of astronomers turned up 1992 QB1 , a body about 200 kilometers wide circling the sun at a distance of about 6.5 billion kilometers, well beyond Neptune's orbit. The Kuiper Belt, populated by leftovers from the solar system's formation, appeared to be real. [More]