[meteorite-list] Gaggle of Potential Dwarf Planets Found by Dark Energy Camera

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25351-gaggle-of-dwarf-planets-found-by-dark-energy-camera.html

Gaggle of dwarf planets found by dark energy camera
by Aviva Rutkin
New Scientist
02 April 2014

Our solar system just got a little more crowded, thanks to discoveries 
from a huge digital camera designed to study dark energy.

Last week astronomers reported the discovery of 2012 VP113 - nicknamed 
"Joe Biden" after the vice president, or VP, of the US. This potential 
dwarf planet was spotted on the outer fringes of the solar system, in 
a region called the inner Oort cloud. Days later, the same team reported 
two more potential dwarfs, known as 2013 FY27 and 2013 FZ27.

Both of these objects are in the Kuiper belt, a grouping of relatively 
small bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune that is also home to Pluto and 
three other known dwarf planets. Astronomers suspect the Kuiper belt is 
littered with dwarfs, but many either reflect too little light or are 
too distant to have been visible in previous sky surveys.

FZ27 sits 50 astronomical units away from the sun, on the far edge of 
the Kuiper belt (1 AU is Earth's distance from the sun). At about 600 
kilometres wide, the object is probably massive enough for it to have 
become nearly round under its own gravity - one of the criteria for being 
classified as a dwarf planet. The other recently discovered object, FY27, 
is probably about 1000 kilometres across and was found roughly 80 AU from 
the sun.

Dark eye

The fresh haul of discoveries is no coincidence. All three objects were 
found in images from the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope in 
Chile, which took its first images in 2012. Boasting 570 megapixels, this 
camera was designed to collect the faint light from millions of very distant 
galaxies in the hunt for clues to the nature of dark energy, the mysterious 
force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

In the process, the camera collects hundreds of gigabytes of data, which 
astronomers can sift through to find far-flung bodies in our solar system 
that until now have been invisible.

"That's why we're finding a lot of these objects, even though they're 
faint," says co-discoverer Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution 
for Science in Washington DC. "We expect to have many more finds in the 
future."