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Article: Move over, Pluto. (Space News).
- Article from:
- Science World
- Article date:
- December 13, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Scholastic, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It's a fact of life, right? The solar system contains nine planets. Don't be so sure. A growing number of scientists think it's time to scratch Pluto from the lineup. "Scientifically it makes sense," says planetary astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Brown's evidence? An icy rock-he and a colleague recently discovered. It orbits 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) from the Sun in Pluto's neighborhood--a region of ice and rocks beyond Neptune's orbit called the Kuiper Belt.
The discoverers have named the icy chunk Quaoar (KWAH-o-ar) after a Native American deity. At about 1,287 km (800 mi) in diameter, Quaoar is ...
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Article: Beyond Pluto, strange new worlds.(Quaoar - Kuiper ...
U.S. News & World Report;
October 21, 2002 ;
447 words
... ... its size--about half that of Pluto--with the Hubble Space Telescope ... nearly 30 percent farther than Pluto. It's in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of millions of icy ... there could be others as big as Pluto, now considered the largest ...
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