New measurements published earlier this month support recent claims that the planetary membership of our Solar System should be extended to include a tenth that is bigger than Pluto. 2003 UB313 was first spotted in January 2005 by Mike Brown’s team at Caltech, but recent thermal emission measurements have recently allowed German scientists to estimate its diameter at approximately 3100 km, some 700 km larger than Pluto. This makes it the biggest object to be discovered in the solar system since the discovery of Neptune in 1846. For comparison, Earth’s Moon has a diameter of about 3500 km.
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