REAL LIFE NEWS: A POSSIBLE NEW DWARF PLANET
by Hazed
There are currently six recognised dwarf planets in the Solar System – that includes the sadly demoted Pluto. Now a new study suggests there may be a seventh.
Planetary body 2014 UZ224 is a very small object found about 92 astronomical units from the sun. It’s been nicknamed DeeDee (short for “distant dwarf”. It was first discovered back in 2014, but a new study has been able to record its size for the first time by picking up its heat signature. The data, from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile, suggests that DeeDee is about 635 kilometres across. That makes it about two-thirds the diameter of dwarf planet Ceres.
If it has enough mass to be spherical, that means it would meet the criteria to be recognised as a dwarf planet: it must orbit the Sun, but cannot be a satellite of another body; it must have enough mass to be spherical; and it should not have cleared its planetary neighbourhood of debris.
DeeDee’s distance from the sun means that of the dwarf planets, only Eris is further away. It takes 1,100 years for DeeDee to complete its orbit around the Sun, and being located in the Kuiper belt it is extremely chilly.
“We calculated that this object would be incredibly cold, only about 30 degrees Kelvin, just a little above absolute zero,” lead author David Gerdes, a scientist with the University of Michigan, said in a statement.
Now we have to wait for more observations to see if DeeDee is spherical, and can be admitted to the dwarf planet club.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/tiny-object-with-very-silly-name-could-be-the-next-dwar-1794295058
