In 2006, and after much debate, the International Astronomical Union came up with a new definition for a planet. And for the first time, the term "dwarf planet" was used.
Pluto is the most well-known dwarf planet of the Kuiper Belt, which lies beyond Neptune. It was discovered on February 18,1930, and was classified as a planet for 76 years. The icy planet has 5 known moons—Charon, Nix, Styx, Kerberos, and Hydra. Pluto is 1,400 miles (2,380 km) ...
Today, astronomers are debating how to define an exoplanet, which is a planet orbiting a star that is not the Sun. Since 1992, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered. Some of these are so big that astronomers are unsure whether they are planets or brown dwarves. A brown dwarf is a...
a Dwarf Planet (Eris) or an Extrasolar planet. An extrasolar planet is a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun. Again, an extrasolar planet can be either Rocky, Gas or Dwarf. We have been discovering planets orbiting other stars. Still, most of those were gas giants whose life...
Vesta recently snatched the "largest asteroid title" from Ceres, whichNASA now classifiesas a dwarf planet.Ceresis the largest object in the main asteroid belt while Vesta is the second largest. As well as coming in a range of sizes, asteroids come in a variety of shapes from near spheres...
The Andromeda Galaxy is not expected to hit the Milky Way for at least 3 billion years. In 3 billion years, the human race, unless it has got off this planet, will no longer exist because the Sun would have made the planet inhabitable. This YouTube video that NASA shared explains more...
when it was "downgraded" to dwarf-planet status. What this reveals more than anything else is not that scientists are in the habit of waffling, but that astronomy is a rich and dynamic field in which a number of major new discoveries are made every year, especially with humankind having pu...
The good news is we’re not all dead, and the planet isn’t destroyed, hurtling off into space or swirling down the gravitational drain into the sun. The bad news is we’re in for some "pretty interesting climate shifts." As it turns out, surviving a near miss with a black hole ...
Given the mass of Earth to be 5.97 x 10^24 kg, the mass of Sun to be 3.955 x 10^30 kg and the gravitational constant, what is the potential energy of planet Earth at both aphelion and perihelion? A 0.145 kg ball leaves the earth with an upward velocity of 15.0 m/s. ...
VHS 1256b is actually closer to a brown dwarf than a planet. Its huge, but it isn’t big enough to start fusion and become a star. The silicate clouds in the atmosphere might actually be a type of sand. One of the reasons VHS 1256b could be observed so well is that, unlike many...