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Small objects could be rounded worlds, based on likely sizes, experts say. Three relatively bright space rocks recently found in Pluto's neighborhood may be new members of the dwarf planet family, astronomers say. The objects were discovered in a little studied section of the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that starts beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends 5.1 billion miles (8.2 billion kilometers) from the sun. Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and colleagues found the bodies using the 1.3-meter Warsaw University Telescope at Las Campanas in Chile. The region of the Kuiper...

A theory is hereby proposed that an unknown mega-massive planet has, for billions of years, been orbiting at 77.2 AU from the sun -- within a 44 AU-wide, virtually empty Great Void that surrounds the Kuiper Belt (One AU = 93 million miles, the mean Earth-Sun distance). The Void is postulated to have been formed by strong gravitational attraction of the unknown planet having removed all CKBOs (Classical Kuiper Belt Objects) that had existed previously in the vicinity of the massive planet's huge orbit... The 77.2 AU distance from the sun of the proposed unknown planet is derived from a...

...a tiny, icy toehold just one-third of a mile wide. The discovery, made by a team of astronomers scouring Hubble Space Telescope observations, sets a new record for the smallest Kuiper Belt object found. Previously, the smallest known Pluto sibling was a 30-mile-wide Kuiper Belt object... Based on the number of known objects in the Kuiper Belt, scientists would have expected to find between 30 and 100 tiny bodies in their analysis of 50,000 guide stars observed by Hubble. So far, the team has only looked at 30 percent of the available Hubble data. "We only found one," Schlichting said....

Our understanding of the Kuiper belt has changed dramatically in these past five years. The best example of this change comes, I think, from the discovery of a large Kuiper belt object that was announced just a few days ago... But, by decoding the numbers, I could tell it was something that had just been discovered a few days before. Like anyone else, my first attempt to know more was a quick trip to Google. Ah ha! A new large Kuiper belt object found from a telescope Chile, by David Rabinowitz! Yes, the same David Rabinowitz from the Haumea discovery....