New Potential Dwarf Planet Found in Solar System

🪐 New dwarf planet candidate discovered

🌌 Milky Way's hidden companions revealed

🔭 JWST finds single line emitter

🚀 Voyager 1 powers down, stays connected

☄️ Ancient Mars meteorite secrets uncovered

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory team member Matthew Holman at the Center for Astrophysics discovered a new dwarf planet candidate designated 2026 ED138 using algorithms designed to detect distant moving Solar System objects.

Rubin's Simonyi Survey Telescope observed ED138 thirty times across twenty nights, revealing an object currently at 46 astronomical units from the Sun with an estimated diameter between 600 and 1,500 kilometers.

If confirmed as a dwarf planet, ED138 would join Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, according to International Astronomical Union criteria requiring sufficient mass for gravitational self-rounding.

Yale University astronomer William Cerny led research identifying two previously unknown Milky Way satellite companions using preview data from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile.

The team discovered Aquarius IV, an ultra-faint galaxy located roughly 355,000 light-years from Earth, and Rubin-GC1, a star cluster hidden behind cosmic dust on the Milky Way's far side.

Yale professor Marla Geha stated these discoveries will help complete the census of Milky Way satellites, potentially revealing hundreds of hidden companions and testing dark matter formation models.

University of Minnesota researchers led by Mason Huberty pioneered a new JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) NIRSpec technique called Multiobject Coronagraphy for Slitless Spectroscopy to conduct unbiased emission-line searches.

The team detected a single emission line at 1.60 microns with flux of 2.5 × 10⁻¹⁸ erg s⁻¹ cm⁻² and an observed equivalent width exceeding 7,620 angstroms, corresponding to no known imaging source.

The mysterious emitter defies standard explanations including oxygen, hydrogen-alpha, and Lyman-alpha lines, with researchers suggesting possible AGN activity, transient phenomena, or an extremely metal-poor primeval galaxy.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers completed a power-conservation procedure nicknamed the "Big Bang" on Voyager 1, simultaneously swapping three heating devices with lower-power alternatives to extend instrument operations.

Voyager 1 will reach one light-day from Earth on November 18, traveling at 38,000 mph while its radioisotope thermoelectric generators lose approximately four watts annually from depleting plutonium supplies.

Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd noted that round-trip communications now require 48 hours, demonstrating both the vastness of interstellar space and humanity's most distant explorer's remarkable endurance.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Yang Liu led characterization of Teghaza 001, a rose-colored Martian meteorite discovered in Mali's Sahara Desert in 2022, calling it a "Rosetta Stone for Mars."

Caltech researchers used novel in-situ rubidium-strontium age-dating on zircon crystals, confirming water alteration around 4.1 billion years ago and making it one of three most ancient Martian meteorites found.

The meteorite's distinctive mineralogy matches Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observations of the southern highlands, providing scientists their first sample from previously unsampled ancient Martian crustal regions.