USATODAY.com – New study suggests more planets lurk in Kuiper belt
Beyond Neptune’s orbit, about four billion miles from the sun in the vicinity of Pluto, lies the Kuiper belt, a ring of comets circling our solar system. Discovery of oversized rivals to Pluto, essentially giant comets, have shaken up our ideas about the Kuiper belt in the last decade. Most recently, the confirmation in a recent Nature study that one of these jumbo icebergs is bigger than Pluto has threatened to expand our solar system’s planetary ranks, a subject of heated debate among astronomers.
Now, a study in The Astrophysical Journal finds that the “10th planet,” discovered last year and named UB313, has a moon, just like Pluto. But that study, led by UB313 discoverer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, also took a look at more moons in the Kuiper Belt. And it suggests that the whoppers of the comet ring formed differently than regular comets.