"Makemake is one of the largest and brightest icy worlds beyond Neptune, and its surface is dominated by frozen methane," ...

A Southwest Research Institute-led team has reported the first detection of gas on the distant dwarf planet Makemake, using ...

Webb uncovers methane on Makemake, showing the icy dwarf planet is more active than once thought - just like Pluto.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that a hazy sky over frozen Pluto is helping to cool the dwarf planet's atmosphere, while at the same time giving methane and other organic ...

Two of Pluto's midsize moons may be made of the guts of its largest moon, Charon, new research suggests.

Makemake is about 890 miles wide, roughly two-thirds the size of Pluto. Early observations indicated it had almost no atmosphere—essentially just a little air, if any. However, Webb's powerful ...

What can the presence of methane on a dwarf planet that orbits farther out than Pluto teach scientists about the formation ...

Pluto might be small and distant, but it keeps surprising scientists. After the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past it in 2015, we got our first real look at its icy landscape and unexpectedly active ...

The methane emission is explained by solar-excited fluorescence. Sunlight interacts with methane molecules, causing them to ...

Oumuamua, the first interstellar object detected in 2017, is most likely a fragment of a Pluto-like body. Scientists believe it was flung out of the solar system billions of years ago during its ...

A new trans-Neptunian object, 2017 OF201, has been found with a vast orbit and potential dwarf planet size. The finding hints ...

The lead author, Sylvia Protopapa, a chief scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), explained that methane dominates Makemake's frozen surface and is now also found in the gas phase above ...