Scientists Announce Discovery of a New Moon in Our Solar System
According to ScienceWorldReport, NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered and confirmed a new moon orbiting the third-largest known dwarf planet, OR10, in our Solar System. This dwarf planet is classified as a Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) and was previously believed to have no moons.
Researchers began to suspect the dwarf planet might have a moon because it rotates more slowly than what has been observed through the Kepler telescope. This suggests that a moon could be influencing its rotational speed. They found that in 2007, OR10 took about 45 hours to complete one rotation, while typically, this duration is only around 24 hours.
The dwarf planet OR10 and its moon located in the Kuiper Belt.
Subsequently, scientists examined images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. They discovered the moon in the images of the dwarf planet OR10 through observations made in 2009 and 2010. The issue was that the moon was initially overlooked.
Csaba Kiss, an astronomer at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest and the lead author of the study, explained that scientists initially missed the moon in Hubble’s images because it was too faint. Later, they used temperature measurements of the dwarf planet from the Herschel Space Observatory. They estimated the moon’s diameter to be between 150 miles and 250 miles.
The research team concluded that the planet and its moon are located in the Kuiper Belt, a region of leftover icy bodies from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They affirmed that most dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are larger than 600 miles. According to TeCake, the discovery of this moon could enhance our understanding of moon development in various solar systems.
