Eris Gets Mass Up-sizing

This week astronomer Mike Brown and graduate student Emily Schaller released new results showing the Kuiper Belt object Eris is 27% more massive then Pluto (which is a few more percentage points more massive than was previously known.

Neither object is a planet. (image credit: NASA)

Here are the stats.

	Pluto	Eris	Mass	13.0×10^21 kg	16.6×10^21 kg
Radius	1195 km	1200 km
Semi-Major Axis	39.5 AU	67.7 AU

For those of you who really really want Pluto to be a planet, please listen to this episode of Astronomy Cast before you send me angry comments.

One Response to “Eris Gets Mass Up-sizing”

1. michael masica says:

   February 2, 2011 at 9:35 am

   I would like to have this as a screensaver!!!!!