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In case you hadn’t heard the news, we just met the new kid in our celestial neighborhood, a massive ninth planet that puts poor Pluto to shame.

At ten times the size of Earth, the addition astronomers have rather insensitively dubbed “Fatty” promises a whole host of new discoveries that will hopefully shame them into giving it a friendlier moniker.

Some people never learn not to make fun of the newbie, but the rest of us can get to know it better with these ten fun facts from Listverse.

It Was Discovered By The Guy Who Killed Pluto

Even if you haven’t heard of Mike Brown, you are indirectly familiar with his work. Back in 2005, he discovered a Kuiper Belt object dubbed Eris, which briefly seemed a candidate for planet status. The discovery touched off a debate over the definition of a planet that ended with Pluto and Eris being bumped down to the status of dwarf planet. This earned Brown a measure of notoriety—he even wrote a book entitled How I Killed Pluto (And Why It Had It Coming).

But in a curious twist of fate, the man who robbed the solar system of a planet could now be giving it a new one…

It’s An Ice Giant

…[I]ts predicted size tells us something important about its physical makeup. The bigger a planet gets, the thicker its atmosphere becomes, as it accumulates more and more gaseous elements in a process known as core accretion. This is thought to be why rocky planets like Earth and Mars can only reach a certain size before they become a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn. Ice giants seem to be a kind of in-between: their atmospheres are thick and made mostly of the same stuff as gas giants, but they’re nowhere near as big.

Planet Nine’s size, larger than any rocky planet, yet smaller than any gas giant, suggests that it may fall into this odd category…

Full story at Listverse via Presurfer.

Exciting space discoveries.

Graphics credit: Canva