Kuiper Belt world measured for the first time in star pass

Astronomers have observed, for the first time, a distant icy world orbiting beyond Neptune as it passed briefly in front of a bright star. This is quite interesting, the observation was made using a team of 42 astronomers from 18 observation stations located in Australia, South Africa, Mexico and the US. The object KBO 55636 is said to be 300km in diameter and rather surprisingly it's albedo is not dull as first thought but bright and reflective, check the article on the BBC website.

BBC

There is another more in-depth article about the observation on the 'Space Daily' website:

Space Daily

Nibiru!!!




Just kidding

reply to post by Frakkerface


he he... someone had to say it Frakkerface

Bit small and cold even for the Nibiru believers...... I think?

It makes me wonder just how many larger objects are out there, even in our own solar system? We've already found ones like Sedna and Quaoar, and several others. For all we know, there could be hundreds of objects like this, or more. We already know about several dozen.

en.wikipedia.org...:EightTNOs.png

Found that picture there on wikipedia; it's got a few objects I hadn't heard of until now.

Here's another one with a size scale. Note that the original post says this new object is 300 km in diameter for comparison, which is

en.wikipedia.org...:TheTransneptunians_Size_Albedo_Color.svg

Here's a list of objects in the solar system by size. This object has a radius of 150 km, 1/2 the diameter.

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by DragonsDemesne



Hi DragonsDemesne, like you I often wonder just what is out there orbiting the Sun way out in the Kuiper Belt, poor old Pluto has now been demoted to a dwarf planet and they now say there could be many other planetoids larger, I know Xena is quite big, some more information on the Kuiper Belt objects:

KBOs are gigantic balls of ice and rock. Some are small, some are tens of km across, and some are as big as the planet Pluto, and maybe larger!

Kuiper Belt

Largest known Kuiper belt objects