After 72 long years, scientists find frozen world beyond Pluto

8216;8216;It8217;s about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big,8217;8217; said planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Brown and post-doctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo discovered the world in images taken on June 4. They were to announce their discovery on Monday in Birmingham, Alabama, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society8217;s Division of Planetary Sciences. The two used a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to discover the provisionally dubbed Quaoar pronounced Kwah-O-Wahr, a creation force in California Indian mythology. Follow-up observations with the Hubble space telescope confirmed its size.

Archival research showed Quaoar had been captured on film as long ago as 1982, but was never noticed. Brown and Trujillo went back and pored over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun.