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A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve orbital dominance like the eight classical planets of the Solar System. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept ...
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown. Estimates have run as high as 200 in the Kuiper belt [1] and over 10,000 in the region beyond. [2] However, consideration of the surprisingly low densities of many large trans-Neptunian objects, as well as spectroscopic analysis of their surfaces, suggests that the number of dwarf planets may be much lower, perhaps only nine among ...
Eris ( minor-planet designation: 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System. [22] It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in the scattered disk and has a high- eccentricity orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory –based team led by Mike Brown and verified later that year.
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Makemake. Makemake[ e] ( minor-planet designation: 136472 Makemake) is a dwarf planet and the largest of what is known as the classical population of Kuiper belt objects, [ b] with a diameter approximately that of Saturn's moon Iapetus, or 60% that of Pluto. [ 24][ 25] It has one known satellite. [ 26]
Haumea (minor-planet designation: 136108 Haumea) is a dwarf planet located beyond Neptune's orbit. [25] It was discovered in 2004 by a team headed by Mike Brown of Caltech at the Palomar Observatory, and formally announced in 2005 by a team headed by José Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain, who had discovered it that year in precovery images taken by the team in 2003.
Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, at a distance of 4.2 ly(1.3 pc), is a red dwarf. A red dwarfis the smallest kind of staron the main sequence. Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of fusingstar in the Milky Way, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun. However, due to their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot be ...
Orcus ( minor-planet designation: 90482 Orcus) is a dwarf planet located in the Kuiper belt, with one large moon, Vanth. [ 7] It has an estimated diameter of 870 to 960 km (540 to 600 mi), comparable to the Inner Solar System dwarf planet Ceres. The surface of Orcus is relatively bright with albedo reaching 23 percent, neutral in color, and ...