On January 5, 2005, astronomers at NASA discovered Eris, the second-largest dwarf planet in the solar system. Eris is just slightly smaller than Pluto, and it orbits the sun about three times farther ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have observed a white dwarf - a highly compact stellar ember - that appears to have gobbled up an icy world akin to the ...

Scientists have detected methane gas glowing faintly above Makemake, an icy dwarf planet smaller and farther than Pluto in space. Until now, Pluto was the only object that far out in the solar system ...

The dwarf planet Ceres, the only dwarf planet in the main asteroid belt, might have once been hospitable for life, according to a recent study. NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA Ceres, the ...

Our solar system is much like a trail of microcosmic breadcrumbs: Follow the molecular bits as far back as they go, and you'll learn a thing or two about where many of our planets and other celestial ...

On August 24, 2006, our solar system lost a planet. It wasn't by cataclysmic destruction, but rather by the vote of the International Astronomical Union, which declared that Pluto, considered the ...

New models suggest that Ceres, the asteroid belt's largest object, once had a radioactive core that could have sustained life in the dwarf planet's hidden subsurface ocean billions of years ago. When ...

Astronomers used a telescope in Hawaii to find a new object on the outer edges of our solar system, helping to fuel evidence of a long-standing theory about Planet Nine, or Planet X. For years, ...

Ammonite was discovered using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, with follow-up confirmation from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Its orbit and size officially qualify it as a distant dwarf planet.

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An illustration of confirmed dwarf planets and their moons. From left to right: Pluto (with ...