Three Dwarf-Planet Candidates Found at Solar System’s Edge -
1:15 PM - Categories: Space By Mark Brown, Wired UK A new survey
of the Kuiper belt — the distant area of the solar system beyond
the orbit of Neptune — has turned up three new icy worlds that
may be dwarf planets like Pluto.Kuiper belt lies roughly 30 to
55 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. In comparison, the
Earth orbits at just 1 AU. Like a frozen asteroid belt, it’s
littered with chunks of ice and frozen methane and ammonia.
Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a
team of astronomers used the 1.3-meter Warsaw Telescope at Las
Campanas Observatory in Chile to hunt for objects in previously
overlooked areas of the belt, including the southern skies and
the galactic plane. His team sniffed out 14 curious objects. 11
of them are far too small to be considered planetlike, and were
probably just regular chunks of ice and rock. But three of the
objects seem to be more than 250 miles wide, which is
potentially big enough to