I'm embarassed to say I'm either totally behind the times or had completely forgotten that they had discovered a 10th planet last year.
A Hubble Press Release:
This is an artist’s concept of Kuiper Belt object 2003 UB313 (nicknamed “Xena”) and its satellite “Gabrielle.”Ground-based observations suggested that Xena was about 30 percent greater in diameter than Pluto, but Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys images, taken on Dec. 9 and 10, 2005, yielded a diameter of 1,490 miles (with an uncertainty of 60 miles) for Xena. Pluto’s diameter, as measured by Hubble, is 1,422 miles.
Xena is the large object at the bottom of this artist’s concept. A portion of its surface is lit by the Sun, located in the upper left corner of the image. Xena’s companion, Gabrielle, is located just above and to the left of Xena.
A larger version of the comparison chart can be seen by clicking on the thumbnail.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Schaller (for STScI)
Very, very cool!
3 comments:
(oops - edit)
Wasn't Xena that mean alien guy who transported a bunch of people to some planet on spacecraft looking like DC-8s, only to nuke them all with hydrogen bombs?
Or maybe I've been spending too much time with Tom "Somebody-needs-Ritalin" Cruise.
P.S. (sorry, just remembered this) -
Brian writes:
"I'm embarassed to say I'm either totally behind the times or had completely forgotten that they had discovered a 10th planet last year."
I think I remember the possibility of a tenth planet being speculated in one of the texts in a high school astronomy class I had (or was it middle school?). If I remember right, it was called simply "Planet X" in the book.
Since then, hadn't heard anything mentioned. Haven't been keeping up on my astronomy or cosmology.
(was born in '86)
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