(Phys.org) —ESA's Herschel space observatory has observed 132 of the known 1400 cold worlds that inhabit a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune, some 4.5–7.5 billion km from the Sun.
I'm just going to warn you, this is a controversial topic. Some people get pretty grumpy when you ask: how many planets are in the Solar System? Is it eight, ten, or more?
Astronomers have used three telescopes at ESO's observatories in Chile to observe the dwarf planet Makemake as it drifted in front of a distant star and blocked its light. The new observations have allowed them to check for ...
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10—nicknamed Snow White—is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has developed a new website, IceHunters (http://www.icehunters.org), to challenge the public to discover Kuiper Belt objects in the outer solar system. ...
The fifth dwarf planet of the Solar System, Haumea, and at least one of its two satellites, are covered in crystalline water-ice due to the tidal forces between them and the heat of radiogenic elements. This is the finding ...
An old story got new legs this week as word went viral of a possible new 9th planet in our solar system – a gas giant bigger than Jupiter – which could be hiding somewhere in the Oort Cloud, just waiting to be found.
In the outer reaches of our solar system lies a mysterious region far more remote and difficult to explore than the Australian outback. It remains the only part of our solar system not visited by spacecraft. Called the Kuiper ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Until now, astronomers have used telescopes to find Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), moon-sized bodies, and obtain their spectra to determine what types of ices are on their surface. They have also used thermal-imaging ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- The solar system does not end abruptly past the planets. Beyond the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet (it orbits the sun at a distance of 30 AU, where one AU is the average distance of the earth from ...
