The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined a dwarf planet in 2006 as a celestial body that orbits the Sun, is round in shape, but has not cleared its orbital neighborhood of objects of ...

COLUMBUS, Ga. (WRBL) – Each year on Feb. 18, a whole day is dedicated to the former planet Pluto. Pluto was once the ninth planet in the solar system, but striped of that title back in 2006. Now ...

Pluto hasn't been a planet for almost 20 years. In the early 2000s, scientists discovered several objects of a similar size to Pluto. So, during the summer of 2006, members of the International ...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Samantha Lawler, Assistant professor, Astronomy, ...

For the better part of a century, we believed there were nine planets in our solar system, with Pluto being the farthest from the sun. Since the discovery of more Pluto-sized dwarf planets, that ...

More than 50 times further from the Sun than Earth, the tiny dwarf planet Makemake is one of the last places you'd expect to find an intact gaseous atmosphere. Not only is it incredibly cold, being ...

The dwarf planet Quaoar has a ring that is too big for its metaphorical fingers. While all other rings in the solar system lie within or near a mathematically determined distance of their parent ...

Active geology—and the large-scale chemistry it can drive—requires significant amounts of heat. Dwarf planets near the far edges of the Solar System, like Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects, formed ...

More than 2 billion kilometers farther from the sun than Pluto, a frigid world named Makemake sports the most distant gas ever seen in our solar system, new observations reveal. “By surprise, we found ...

Researchers have detected something very unique in Makemake, a dwarf planet beyond Neptune in the Solar System. This new finding has been explained in detail in the journal The Astrophysical Journal ...