A Corrected Size for the Moon of Orcus

Department: 
Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
Teaser: 

The moon Vanth turns out to be in fact smaller than Orcus

Source: 

Planetary Society Weblog Download time: Jan 15 2011 9:31 AM ET

So here's my other correction for today: earlier this week I got all excited about the Orcus-Vanth system, a Kuiper belt binary system containing two bodies of very different color and therefore likely different albedo. It turns out there was a math error in the version of the paper that I read, which resulted in the notion that Vanth could be nearly as big as Orcus. When the math error was corrected for the final published version of the ....