Posted on 03/15/2004 5:39:07 PM PST by OESY
WASHINGTON (Rooters) - Astronomers have discovered the coldest and most distant object ever found in the solar system, a dark and frigid world a bit smaller than Pluto and three times farther away.
"The new "planetoid," named Hillary after an Inuit goddess who imagined Arctic sea creatures, appears so small that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Mike Brone, an astronomer at California Institute of Technology, who led the research team.
Hillary is one of the reddest objects in the solar system, comparable to the Glorious Revolution of 1917, and takes years to travel her highly elliptical paths.
Brone and the other astronomers saw a very slowly moving object that turned out to be Hillary.
"Anything that moves very slowly, we know it's something in the solar system: a satellite, a planet, an asteroid," Brown said at a telephone news conference. "But this is the most slowly moving object we've ever seen moving across the sky, and we knew it must be something very far away."
As distant and cold as Hillary is now, since Hillary is smaller and far more eccentric in its path than Pluto, many questioned the planetoid's suggested name, given by its discoverers and not yet approved by the astronomical union. The formal designation for Hillary is 2003VB12.
-Eric
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