Pick of the Pics and Updating Magic Universe A kennelful of
Pluto puppies Three successive images from the Hubble Space
Telescope show two remote objects in the Solar System inching
across the sky in front of a distant galaxy (bottom left of each
image). The near-vertical streaks are due to the objects moving
while Hubble was watching. They are small “trans-Neptunian”
objects – comets or asteroids – orbiting the Sun at about 43
times farther out than the Earth. They appear to be companions,
at about half the separation of the Earth and Moon. Credits: a
negative version of part of Fig. 3 in Fuentes et al.,
Astrophysical Journal (see references); imagery from HST/ACS/WFC
Soon to be published is the discovery of 14 new members of the
Solar System in the so-called Kuiper Belt beyond the most
distant “real” planet, Neptune. They are 40-100 km leftover
scraps from the building of the Sun’s family of planets. To find
them, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics and Northern Arizona University, l