Astronomers believe they’ve detected an atmosphere around a tiny, icy world beyond Pluto
Researchers said the 300-mile-wide object’s air is 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth’s and may need Webb confirmation.
- In a study appearing Monday in Nature Astronomy, observational astronomer Ko Arimatsu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan reported detecting a thin atmosphere around the Kuiper Belt object 2002 XV93.
- Located more than 3.4 billion miles away, the 470-kilometer-wide body is the smallest object yet found with a global atmosphere, challenging conventional views that atmospheres are limited to large planets and moons.
- Arimatsu and colleagues tracked the object using telescopes in Japan, observing a distant star's light fade gradually over about 1.5 seconds, indicating starlight refraction by a tenuous atmosphere.
- If the atmosphere persists or varies seasonally, it may point to ongoing gas supply from ice volcanoes; alternatively, the gas could stem from a recent impact by an icy body, Arimatsu noted.
- Future observations by NASA's Webb Space Telescope will verify the atmosphere's composition. "The implications are profound if verified," said Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern, lead scientist behind NASA's New Horizons mission.
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104 Articles
The celestial body with the scientific name (612533) 2002 XV93 has a diameter of only about 500 kilometers, orbiting the Sun at about the same distance as Pluto.
Cape Canaveral., A new study suggests that a small frozen world beyond Pluto houses a thin and delicate atmosphere that could have been created by volcanic eruptions or the impact of a comet.
Deep in the furthest outer regions of the solar system, astronomers have discovered an atmosphere around an ice dwarf. That is ‘very strange’ for such a...
Mysterious world beyond Pluto may have an atmosphere
A tiny, little-known world beyond Pluto appears to have an atmosphere, Japanese astronomers said Monday, defying what had been thought possible for icy objects in our cosmic backyard. If confirmed, the roughly 500-kilometre-wide (310-mile) rock would become just the second world past Neptune in our Solar System to host an atmosphere -- after only Pluto itself. Formerly classified as a planet, Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006, in …
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