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Six new moons were discovered, and the planet was shown to have more than one ring. [167] [192] The flyby provided the first accurate measurement of Neptune's mass which was found to be 0.5 per cent less than previously calculated. The new figure disproved the hypothesis that an undiscovered Planet X acted upon the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
2060 Chiron. 2060 Chiron is a ringed small Solar System body in the outer Solar System, orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. Discovered in 1977 by Charles Kowal, it was the first-identified member of a new class of objects now known as centaurs —bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt.
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun, located 4.25 light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus. This object was discovered in 1915 by Robert Innes. It is a small, low-mass star, too faint to be seen with the naked eye, with an apparent magnitude of 11.13. Its Latin name means the 'nearest [star] of Centaurus'.
A total of five planets are going retrograde between May and September: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "Retrograde" is a term used to describe when a planet's orbit appears to slow ...
Ring system. The moons Prometheus (right) and Pandora (left) orbit just inside and outside, respectively, the F ring of Saturn, but only Prometheus is thought to function as a shepherd moon. A ring system is a disc or torus orbiting an astronomical object that is composed of solid material such as gas, dust, meteoroids, planetoids or moonlets ...
There is a barely visible continuation of the ring beyond the orbit of Thebe, extending up to 280 000 km (3.75 R J) and called the Thebe Extension. [2] [31] In forward-scattered light the ring appears to be about 3 times fainter than the Amalthea gossamer ring. [2] In back-scattered light it has been detected only by the Keck telescope. [4]
A planet's atmospheric conditions influence its ability to retain heat so that the location of the habitable zone is also specific to each type of planet: desert planets (also known as dry planets), with very little water, will have less water vapor in the atmosphere than Earth and so have a reduced greenhouse effect, meaning that a desert ...