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dwarf planet

Makemake’s Mysteriously Missing Atmosphere

November 21, 2012

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Artist’s impression of the surface of Makemake, a dwarf planet beyond Pluto (ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger) It turns out there’s no air up there: the distant dwarf planet Makemake is surprisingly lacking in an atmosphere, according to findings made by astronomers using [...]

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Vesta’s Deep Grooves Could Be “Stretch Marks” From Impact

September 28, 2012

Dawn image of Vesta showing its nearly circumferential equatorial grooves (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) Even though NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has departed Vesta the trove of data it’s gathered about this fascinating little world continues to fuel new discoveries. Most recently, some researchers are suggesting that Vesta’s curious grooves — long, deep troughs that wrap around its equator, noticed [...]

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Researchers Present the Sharpest Image of Pluto Ever Taken from Earth

September 26, 2012

A “speckle image” reconstruction of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon (Gemini Observatory/NSF/NASA/AURA) Real planet, dwarf planet, KBO, who cares? What matters here is that astronomers have created the sharpest image of Pluto ever made with ground-based observations — and developed a new way to verify potential Earth-like exoplanets at the same time. Here’s how [...]

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Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet

January 5, 2012

This article was originally written in 2008, but we created a cool video to go along with it yesterday Let’s find out why Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Astronomers had long predicted that there would be [...]

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Planet Snow White… Or Rose Red?

August 23, 2011

Discovered in 2007 by former graduate student Meg Schwamb, dwarf planet Snow White orbits at the edge of the Solar System. Roughly half the size of Pluto, its color was nicknamed erroneously. At one time it was surmised the diminutive planet was a white, icy world broken away from a larger planet, but further studies [...]

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