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Want to leave a comment? Only registered members of Astronomy. Registration is FREE and only takes a couple minutes. Pluto was always an oddity. It circles the sun in an oddly tilted, looping orbit. Things came to a head in , when Caltech astronomer Michael Brown discovered Eris, an object almost identical in size to Pluto, in the same outer region of the solar system.
The distant, frigid zone beyond Neptune where they reside is now known as the Kuiper Belt, and the many smaller objects that surround them are called, simply, Kuiper Belt Objects. One notable exception is Ceres , whose mile diameter makes it the largest asteroid by far. Many scientists regard Ceres as a fossil protoplanet, the last survivor of the swarm of flying rocks that came together to form the eight main planets 4.
But there are many others awaiting classification, and there could be still more out there that haven't been discovered. Astronomers keep finding sizable objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. While we wait, Brown keeps a running tally of dwarf planet candidates on his website.
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