Originally published August 6 2005
Tenth planet found in solar system
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A research group led by Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology announced that they discovered the tenth planet in the solar system and named it "2003-UB313."
That means it must be a planet, so now object 2003UB313, spotted two years ago by astronomers in California, has been officially identified as the 10th planet in the solar system, and tentatively christened Xena.
The body is believed to be about 1,700 miles in diameter, about a quarter the size of the Earth, and about one-and-a-half times the size of Pluto, the ninth and last planet to be discovered, in 1930.
But at nearly 10 billion miles out, Xena is the most distant object detected orbiting the Sun, three times as far out as Pluto and 97 times as far out as the Earth.
Like many other new wonders, Xena has emerged from California, having been discovered by astronomers at the Mount Palomar observatory near San Diego run by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Michael Brown, Caltech's professor of planetary astronomy, and his colleagues Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University, first photographed it on 31 October 2003, with the 48in Samuel Oschin telescope, normally used to track asteroids that might pose a collision danger with the Earth.
It has taken scientists this long to discover it because its orbit is tilted at a 45-degree angle to the orbital plane of the other planets.
Xena is believed to be part of the Kuiper Belt, a great band of icy objects beyond Neptune, that are believed to be remnants of the material that formed the solar system.
"This is the first object to be confirmed to be larger than Pluto in the outer solar system," Professor Brown said, adding that although its exact size was yet to be determined, it was "definitely bigger than Pluto".
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