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Eris (minor-planet designation: 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System. [22] It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in the scattered disk and has a high-eccentricity orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory–based team led by Mike Brown and verified later that year.
Almost immediately, some astronomers questioned Pluto's status as a planet. Barely a month after its discovery was announced, on April 14, 1930, in an article in The New York Times, Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto's dimness and high orbital eccentricity made it more similar to an asteroid or comet: "The Lowell result confirms the ...
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown. Estimates have run as high as 200 in the Kuiper belt [1] and over 10,000 in the region beyond. [2] However, consideration of the surprisingly low densities of many large trans-Neptunian objects, as well as spectroscopic analysis of their surfaces, suggests that the number of dwarf planets may be much lower, perhaps only nine among ...
The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept was adopted in 2006. Dwarf planets are capable of being geologically active, an expectation that was borne out in 2015 by the Dawn mission to Ceres and the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
Quaoar (minor-planet designation: 50000 Quaoar) is a ringed dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a region of icy planetesimals beyond Neptune.It has an elongated ellipsoidal shape with an average diameter of 1,090 km (680 mi), about half the size of the dwarf planet Pluto.
By RYAN GORMAN Scientists may have found Planet X -- the long-rumored object believed to be larger than Earth and further from the sun than Pluto. Planet X and another object dubbed "Planet Y ...
Makemake [e] (minor-planet designation: 136472 Makemake) is a dwarf planet and the largest of what is known as the classical population of Kuiper belt objects, [b] with a diameter approximately that of Saturn's moon Iapetus, or 60% that of Pluto. [24] [25] It has one known satellite. [26]