REAL LIFE NEWS: POOR PLUTO GETS DEMOTED AGAIN
by Hazed
Poor Pluto. Not only has it suffered the humiliation of being banned from the planet club, now it's lost its place as the largest of the dwarf planets. The bad news is that Pluto is actually smaller than the recently discovered Eris, which it turns out is 27% more massive according to calculations.
Michael Brown and Emily Schaller of the California Institute of Technology used data from the Hubble telescope and from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to calculate the mass. Scientists had already determined that Eris's diameter, at 1,500 miles, made it physically larger than Pluto's 1,400 miles, but now they know it's heavier too, it seems Pluto has lost its status yet again. How sad.
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