FRANCE: With less than a day to go before NASA’s New Horizons mission zooms past Pluto, scientists reported on Monday that the dwarf planet isn’t quite as dwarfish as they thought — in fact, it’s the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune.
How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto’s downfall as the “ninth planet” back in 2006. Eris’ diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).
“This settles the debate about the largest object in the Kuiper Belt,” the wide ring of icy material that lies outside the orbit of Neptune, said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.
Stern said New Horizons’ observations also confirmed that Pluto has a polar ice cap, and that the composition of that cap is different and more methane-rich than the dark bands and splotches of material ringing Pluto’s equator. The piano-sized probe’s instruments also have detected atoms of nitrogen escaping from the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, Stern said.
Elsewhere in the Plutonian system, New Horizons’ measurements confirmed that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, is 751 miles (1,208 kilometers) across — and that the smaller icy moons Nix and Hydra are 20 and 30 miles (35 and 45 kilometers) wide, respectively.
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