Tenth Planet Slightly Larger Than Pluto |
|
Written by spacetravel.org
|
|
Saturday, 15 April 2006 13:18 |
|
Xena, dubbed the solar system's "tenth planet," is larger than Pluto, the most distant of the planets orbiting the sun, NASA said Wednesday.
SPACE WIRE
'10th planet' a tad larger than Pluto: NASA
WASHINGTON, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2006
Xena, dubbed the solar system's "tenth planet," is larger than Pluto, the most distant of the planets orbiting the sun, NASA said Wednesday.
"For the first time, NASA'S Hubble Space Telescope has seen distinctly the 'tenth planet' currently nicknamed 'Xena,' and found that it is only slightly larger than Pluto," the US space agency said in a statement.
Xena has a diameter of 2,398 kilometers (1,480 miles), with a 96 kilometer (60 mile) margin of error, according to Hubble data. Pluto has a 2,288 kilometer (1,422 mile) diameter.
"Hubble is the only telescope capable of getting a clean visible light measurement of the actual diameter of Xena," said Mike Brown, planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
Brown's team first discovered Xena, located 15 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) away from Earth, in July 2005.
Xena takes 560 years to orbit the sun, and it is near the most distant part of its orbit from the center of the Solar System.
If Xena qualifies as a planet, the International Astronomical Union will give it a permanent name.
Source: Agence France-Presse.
|