1992: David Jewitt discovers 1992 QB1 at a magnitude of 22.8 in the same orbital zone as Pluto.
It has an Orbital Semi-Major Axis (OSA) of 43.7 AU, compared to Pluto's OSA of 39.5 AU.
However, QB1 is much smaller than Pluto, with a diameter of 450 km compared to Pluto's 2300 km diameter.
In addition to Pluto and Charon, there is now a new member of a long-theorized ring of objects past Neptune, the "Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt". Originally proposed to explain similar aphelion distances of short-period comets.
|
|