PLUTO's status as a planet is in danger. Astronomers have found
a similar object more than half Pluto's diameter in the Kuiper
Belt, a collection of primordial icy bodies beyond the orbit of
Neptune. The object, dubbed "Quaoar", is the biggest thing found
in the Solar System since the discovery of Pluto. Many
researchers feel that because Quaoar isn't counted as a planet -
it's more like a big dirty snowball - then Pluto, which also
orbits in the Kuiper Belt, shouldn't be called a planet either.
"This helps to displace the opinion that Pluto is a planet,"
says Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. Astronomers have found several hundred Kuiper Belt
objects besides Pluto since the first was discovered in 1992,
but Quaoar is by far the largest. Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo
of Caltech first spotted it in June this year, after months of
surveying the ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to
receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of
archive content.