A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years

Re:A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the ne... by isoprophlex on Sunday June 20, 2021 @04:13PM (#27573486)

It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...

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Re:A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the ne... by azernik on Sunday June 20, 2021 @05:00PM (#27573859)

For comparison, that's about 10% of the Moon's diameter, i.e. 0.1% of its volume. (The mass ratios are probably within that 0.1% ballpark, but can't tell for sure until we know more about its composition.)

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Re:A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the ne... by eb0la on Monday June 21, 2021 @03:28AM (#27577073)

IMHO beign able to spot something with this size at this distance is really awesome.

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Re:A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the ne... by azernik on Monday June 21, 2021 @06:51AM (#27577972)

Interestingly, the images came from the Dark Energy Survey [1], which for entirely different different reasons is running a very sensitive and high-resolution scan of the sky in visible and near-infrared. This just happened to show up in a frame where they were looking for distant galaxies and events, and the Minor Planets Center noticed the thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Energy_Survey

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