Tag archives for dwarf planet
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After nearly a half million votes cast by the public, Pluto’s two tiniest moons may have new names—one of which could be named after the home world of famous fictional pointy-eared humanoid Mr. Spock. Astronomer Michael Showalter and his team who discovered these tiny worldlets asked the online community for help in naming the moons, now…
Even though Pluto may have been officially kicked out of the major planet club, the number of moons orbiting the dwarf planet has increased by two in just the last couple of years. And now astronomers need your help in naming these newly discovered moons. The naming contest for two of the tiniest satellites, measuring…
A New Milestone for New Horizons
Posted by Jason Major on December 9, 2011 
Artist’s rendering of New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute (Dan Durda)/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Ken Moscati) Last Friday, December 2, 2011, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the closest spacecraft ever to Pluto, a record previously held by Voyager 1 which came within 983 million miles of Pluto on January 29, 1986. This…
Posted by It’s time for a luau! On Wednesday the IAU finally approved a name for our solar system’s fifth dwarf planet: Haumea, after a Hawaiian fertility goddess. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, whose team found the object in 2004, definitely seems to be on a roll filling the sky with non-Greek or Roman…
