investigator mold with the Hubble Space Telescope have happen upon a moon in scope around Makemake , a distant small - planet that ’s about two - third the sizing of Pluto .
Discovered in 2005 , Makemake ( enounce mak - eh , mak - eh ) is one of the brightest and largest aim in the Kuiper Belt . It ’s one of several magnanimous trans - Neptunian object ( TNOs ) known to astronomer , other notable examples being Pluto , Eris , and Sedna . The dwarf planet , named after a macrocosm deity of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island , amount about 870 miles ( 1,400 km ) wide , and boast a bitterly frigid surface covered with methane , ethane , and possibly N gases . Makemake is 52.4 AU from the sunlight ( where 1 AU equalize the average distance of the Earth to the sunlight ) , whereas Pluto ’s average distance is about 40 AU .
https://gizmodo.com/everyplace-we-used-to-think-was-a-planet-until-we-knew-1726072753
Many gnome planets have moons , so it comes as niggling surprisal to acquire that Makemake has one , too . Hubble scientist found the moon , dub MK 2 , about a year ago , but they only announced the discovery this week . The discovery was made by Alex Parker and crony from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder , Colorado , and it was made possible using Hubble ’s spacious Field Camera 3 .
The newly discovered satellite — formally known asS/2015 ( 136472 ) 1 — is around 100 miles ( 160 km ) wide , and is parked in orbit some 13,000 miles ( 21,000 kilometer ) from Makemake . Preliminary estimation lay its orbital period at about a dozen years . This tight orbit suggests that MK 2 is plausibly the resultant of a hit between Makemake and another Kuiper belt object .
Unlike its comparatively bright host ( Makemake is the second - brightest Kuiper belt object after Pluto ) , MK 2 is incredibly sorry — about 1,300 times fainter than Makemake — so it essentially resemble a glob of floating wood coal . So why the stark difference in brightness ? uranologist conceive the moon ’s gravitation is n’t substantial enough to hold onto shining and icy control surface material that change from solid to gas when warm up by the sun . This mean the moonlight is similar to comets and other Kuiper Belt objects , which tend to be incubate by black material .
The discovery of MK 2 shows that Pluto and Makemake are quite interchangeable . As squad drawing card Marc Buie put it in a Hubble release , “ This newfangled discovery open a new chapter in relative planetology in the out solar organization . ” In addition to host satellites , Pluto and Makemake also sport a surface deal in stock-still methane . Looking ahead , the researchers would wish to set the concentration of Makemake , and to see if the fresh discovered moonlight is in an elliptical or rotary eye socket .
[ Hubble ]
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