Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Moon around Kuiper Belt Object

Posted by michael on Tuesday April 23, 2002 @05:30PM from the waltzing-matilda dept.

UncleJosh writes "Today's NY Times (free reg rq'd) has a story about the first Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) with a moon, 1998 WW31. The hubble telescope has been used to get information about the size and orbit of the moon. Seems lots of things have moons. Coming more than 20 years after the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon the discovery of a KBO with a moon also follows the discovery of asteroid Ida's moon Dactyl and other moons of asteriods."

1 of 37 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Too bad this isn't in the main section by ramoth4 · 2002-04-23 18:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'd like to see what others think about this, instead of a measly 2 replys.

This poses major questions though, about what exactly is a planet. Is Jupieter a planet? It puts out more heat than it takes in. What about Pluto? It's not in a regular orbit. What about that whole "Nemesis" theory? What's that got to do with this?