This planet was discovered by the American astronauts who used The Palomar Observer in California. Officially, this cosmic object was named “2003 UB313”, but one team’s member, named Michael Brown, announced that the ones that discovered it propose the name “Xena” – like the SF “warrior princess” staring Lucy Lawless, the New Zealand actress. They might have thought about “X” like the unknown thing in science.
It is a bizarre world out there which is more then 14 thousand million kilometers from Earth and witch is more than ten times more far away from the Sun then our planet. Also, “Xena” is three times the distance to Pluto, the last new planet. A man on “Xena” would see the Sun as any shinier star.
Xena would be the perfect place to take a vacation for Earth people that don’t like heat because the temperature on the ground is with a few degrees higher than the freezing temperature. A xenian year, a complete orbit around the Sun, is as 560 of our years.
Some astronauts do not agree that the discovery is a actual planet, but a bigger asteroid. There are also some astronauts that think Xena is just another one of the thousand
“little planets” of your Solar System.
American astronauts estimated, by its luminosity, that the planet Xena is in fact a little bigger then Pluto which diameter is almost 2200 kilometers. Recently, the scientific world was agitated by the major controversy arouse by the astronauts about the fact the Pluto is not itself a major planet, but a minor big planet. The controversy calmed, the winners where the ones who believed that Pluto is one of the nine major planets that evolves around the Sun.
Pluto and Xena are a part of the so-called “Kuyper belt” of the out-skirts of the Solar System, this belt being made of thousands of objects.
The problem with which the astronauts are confronting is that there is no exact definition of a planet. If Pluto has been discovered today and not in 1930 (by Clyde Tombaugh), maybe it would not qualify as a “major planet”.
Xena was seen for the first time on the 8th of January, but astronauts announced the discovery on 3.05.2008 because they wanted to take more exact measurements.
