Just a few weeks ago, astronomers made a huge discover:
a gigantic galaxy circling our own appeared seemingly out of nowhere. And now
Hubble has discovered a new moon roaming in plain sight at the borders of our
very own Solar System. Astronomers discovered this moon circling the second
brightest icy dwarf planet, Makemake, way past Pluto in the Kuiper belt, and
it's about 161 km (100 miles) in diameter. So what took us so long to discover
this significant object in our own cosmic backyard?
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Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Alex Parker
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The main reason is darkness. Yes, the newly spotted
moon, which has been momentarily called 'S/2015 (136472) 1', was able to stay
hidden from us for so long because it's extremely dark. This particular moon
returns such a minute amount of light that astronomers have struggled to see it
next to the brightness of Makemake. S/2015 (136472) 1 or 'MK 2' for short, is more
than 1,300 times dimmer than its host planet.
Astronomers decided to target the Hubble Space
Telescope at Makemake for over two hours back in April, 2015 and after that the
moon finally revealed itself.
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Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Alex Parker
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Alex Parker, an astronomer from the Southwest Research
Institute in Texas, was reviewing the data obtained, he discovered a faint
point of light moving about Makemake nealry 20,900 km (13,000 miles) away. You
can view that tiny point of light in the Hubble images above.
Parker told National Geographic “I was sure someone had
seen it already” He enquired his fellow astronomer Marc Buie about it, who
replied with: "There's a moon in the Makemake data?" "It was at
that point that everything got exciting and kicked into high gear” said Parker.
The astronomers now desire to use Hubble Space
Telescope for additional study and to figure out the exact orbit of MK2 in the
hopes of knowing more about the structure and density of the icy dwarf planet.
The study has been put forward for peer review, and is issued
on the pre-print site arXiv.org so others astronomers and experts can also add
their thoughts.
It's quite thrilling to know that there's still much
out there in space that we haven't discovered as yet. Who knows, this might
also be the year we finally spot the Planet Nine.
