316 New Minor Planets Found Beyond Neptune
4 min readMar 11, 2020
Hundreds of new minor planets have just been discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune. How did astronomers find so many trans-Neptunian objects at once?
Astronomers in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) report the discovery of 316 minor planets beyond Neptune. Of these, 139 were entirely unknown before this new study, while 245 were seen in earlier observations by the DES.
More than six years of data about the night sky was compiled during the Dark Energy Survey, compiling the most-detailed images of the southern sky ever assembled. This…
