More than 2 billion kilometers farther from the sun than Pluto, a frigid world named Makemake sports the most distant gas ever seen in our solar system, new observations reveal.
“By surprise, we found evidence of gas” on Makemake, even though it currently resides 53 times as far from the sun as Earth does, says Silvia Protopapa, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. She and her colleagues submitted the discovery September 8 to arXiv.org.
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