Scientists have discovered a new moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, that resides in the frigid outskirts in our solar system.
The combined power of three space observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has helped uncover the moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10 in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from our solar system’s formation, which is believed to have happened about 4.6 billion years ago.
With this discovery, it appears that most of the known dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt larger than 965 kilometres across have companions. These bodies can provide some insight into how moons formed in the young solar system.
The discovery of satellites around all of the known large dwarf planets, except for Sedna, means that at the time these bodies formed, billions of years ago, collisions must have been more frequent, and that’s a constraint on the formation models.
The objects most likely slammed into each other more often because they inhabited a crowded region.
The team uncovered the moon in archival images of 2007 OR10 taken by the Hubble Telescope.
Observations taken of the dwarf planet by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope first tipped off the astronomers of the possibility of a moon circling it. Kepler revealed that 2007 OR10 has a slow rotation period of 45 hours.
The dwarf planet is about 1,528 kilometres across, and the moon is estimated to be 240 kilometres to 400 kilometres in diameter. 2007 OR10, like Pluto, follows an eccentric orbit, but it is currently three times further than Pluto is from the sun.
2007 OR10 is a member of an exclusive club of nine dwarf planets. Of those bodies, only Pluto and Eris are larger than 2007 OR10. It was discovered in 2007 by astronomers Meg Schwamb, Mike Brown, and David Rabinowitz as part of a survey to search for distant solar system bodies using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in the US.