Thursday, September 23, 2010

Pluto Gets 14 New Neighbors - Breaking Orbit

Pluto Gets 14 New Neighbors - Breaking Orbit: "Beyond Neptune's orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place.

But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies—or at least, so we think.

Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. Since then we've found a thousand or so objects in Pluto's domain. Some have even been given exotic names, such as Chaos, Ixion, Quaoar, and Rhadamanthus."

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