SPACE CADETS / HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT FINDS NEW PLANET.

This blog suggests the dwarf planet be named “Waldo” to match the  image above. 

Scientist David Gerdes, an astronomer associated with the University of Michigan, announced that his UM team found a new dwarf planet orbiting our sun.  Still unnamed except for its catalog number 2014 UZ224, the new planetary hunk of rock is 300+ miles wide and eight billion (that’s a “b”) miles from the same sun that we are currently orbiting.

Other data collected from the discovering team shows one orbit around the sun would take the mini-planet more than 1,000 years to complete.

         Gerdes says the discovery came after he invited five grad students and gave them an assignment, which was to discover orbiting bodies in the sky not previously detected.

         Voila!

         2014 UZ224 is now on the lips of astronomers world wide thanks to a creative homework assignment.  Why?  Because it is new and it is now the 3^rd most distant dwarf planet discovered in our solar system.

Here’s more:

2014 UZ224 is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) and possible dwarf planet orbiting in the scattered disc. As of October 10, 2016, it is approximately 90.8 AU from the Sun, slowly decreasing in distance until its closest point to the Sun of 38 AU sometime near 2142. Currently the orbit is very uncertain, but known enough to make 2014 UZ224 the third furthest known Solar System object from the Sun, after Eris (96.2 AU) and V774104 (~103 AU).  –Wikipedia.