Researchers find a tiny moon around a large unnamed dwarf planet

Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. These two images taken a year apart reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 shows the companion in a different orbit

Frank Williams | 23 May, 2017, 03:05

2007 OR10 is the third-largest known dwarf planet, behind Pluto and Eris, and the largest unnamed world in the Solar System. Astronomers discovered a small moon orbiting 2007 OR10 or "Snow White", the third-biggest dwarf planet in our solar system.

Snow White is a 950-mile-wide (1,530 kilometers) dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of frigid bodies beyond Neptune.

The existence of this moon and moons around other large dwarf planets gives us clues as to what this region of space looked like billions of years ago.

Between Mars and Jupiter, It resides in the main asteroid belt and the planet, called 2007 OR10 has a diameter of 955 miles across.

The moon was spotted by the astronomers in two separate Hubble observations that were conducted in gap of an year. However, the Kepler Space Telescope was the first to tip the astronomers of the possibility of a moon orbiting the dwarf planet. "The initial investigator missed the moon in the Hubble images because it is very faint", Kiss, who is the lead author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said.

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The discovery was made using the three powerful observatories including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The object's newfound satellite is pretty big, with an estimated diameter of 150 to 250 miles (240 to 400 km), researchers reported in the new study.

As the study pens down, the objects are most likely to slam into each other more frequently due to their residence in a crowded region. The discovery might help them in finding out how moons are formed. But Kepler found that 2007 OR10 took 45 hours to complete one rotation, indicating that a moon might be tugging on it and slowing down its spin. With this discovery, scientists have confirmed that, most of the known dwarf planets, located in the Kuiper Belt - a realm larger than 600 miles across - have companions.

A new moon is discovered around a dwarf planet in our solar system.

Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Its distance from the Sun is about three times the distance between Pluto and Sun. "If there were frequent collisions, then it was quite easy to form these satellites".

Four and a half billion years ago, the solar system was a swirling jumble, forming, colliding, re-forming. Too fast and the collision creates a bunch of debris. Pluto is the largest object in the belt, with one large moon. According to John Stansberry, a member of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, "This gravitational force of dense celestial bodies may have bumped them out of their respective orbits and also contributed to the increment of their velocities, which may later have resulted in crashes".

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Researchers find a tiny moon around a large unnamed dwarf planet

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