Hubble Discovers A New Moon
Astronomers find a moon orbiting a dwarf planet on the outskirts of our solar system.
On April 27, 2015, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered a tiny moon orbiting Makemake, a dwarf planet located beyond the orbit of Neptune, roughly 4.8 billion miles from Earth. The moon, nicknamed MK 2, is estimated to be just 100 miles in diameter. Earlier attempts made with Hubble to find moons in orbit around Makemake turned up empty. For MK 2, one of the problems was being able to see its faint reflection in the glare of its much larger planetary companion. In order to spot it, astronomers tried taking multiple long-exposure photographs using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The instrument detects light in a range that’s a little bit wider than what the human eye can see. The trick was to expose the image long enough to bring out any objects around the planet, but not so much as to overexpose the image. By combining the photos, astronomers could easily see the moon. Explore the images to learn more.
An artist’s concept of Makemake. The dwarf planet is 870 miles across and was discovered in 2005.
On April 27, 2015, Hubble collected six, 12-minute-long exposures of Makemake.
By combining the images, astronomers were able to make out a small moon (white dot, above) located 13,000 miles from the dwarf planet.
Future observations by Hubble could reveal additional moons around Makemake.
For More Information
See NASA.gov
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Cover image courtesy of NASA/ESA/SwRI/A. Parker
Makemake artist concept courtesy of NASA
Hubble images courtesy of NASA/ESA/SwRI/A. Parker and M. Buie
Hubble Space Telescope image courtesy of NASA/ESA
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Writer
- None None (NASA Viz Team)
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Scientist
- Keith Noll (NASA/GSFC)
Release date
This page was originally published on Tuesday, May 31, 2016.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:48 PM EDT.