NASA to make major announcement about the discovery of a new planet

I subscribe to NASA press releases, and this just hit my inbox.

A media teleconference will be held today to announce major findings regarding the detection of a new planet in our solar system.

Dr. Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., will present his discovery of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the Sun. He and his colleagues made the observations as part of a NASA-funded research project.

It is just a few minutes before 7pm EDT, the scheduled start of the teleconference, and this e-mail just now arrived. And why announce this on a Friday night when it will get little media play?

My 3 year old knows the names of all the planets (thanks to a song on "Blue's Clues"). Is he going to have to learn one more?

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here are more details.

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system.

The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The discovery was announced today by planetary scientist Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose research is partly funded by NASA.

The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown said. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, the planet is the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.

"It will be visible with a telescope over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," said Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., on January 8.

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

"It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Brown, who is a professor of planetary astronomy.

...

A name for the new planet has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name.

For more information on the discovery and to view images, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/newplanet-072905-images.html

UPDATE: NASA has pictures on their website. NASA images are generally not copyrighted and may be reproduced for educational purposes. Here is the picture:

These time-lapse images of a newfound planet in our solar system, called 2003UB313, were taken on Oct. 21, 2003, using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The planet, circled in white, is seen moving across a field of stars. The three images were taken about 90 minutes apart.

Scientists did not discover that the object in these pictures was a planet until Jan. 8, 2005. Image credit: Samuel Oschin Telescope, Palomar Observatory

This is what an artists conception of the planet looks like with the sun in the distance. Obviously, it will be a long time before we actually get that close!

UPDATE (yet again): They want to call the new planet "Xena" after the TV show starring Lucy Lawless. Why "Xena"? Well...

'We have always wanted to name something Xena,' said Michael Brown, a member of the team that made the discovery using telescopes at the Palomar Observatory, outside San Diego, California.

Uh huh... Anyway, you can read the story of the brewing controversy here. No, the controversy isn't over the name, it's whether this should be a considered a planet at all. Some would even want to demote Pluto to "minor planet" status, a point that Phil Miller had already seized upon with this post.