Astronomers have found that the DeeDee object discovered earlier in the solar system is a spherical dwarf planet. This is reported on the Phys.org website.
DeeDee was discovered in the fall of 2016 with the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. With the help of this instrument, observations are carried out within the framework of the Dark Energy Survey project, the purpose of which is to study dark energy. At the same time, they managed to capture 12 percent of the sky, which makes it possible to search for various objects. So, about 1.1 billion celestial bodies were identified, the vast majority of which turned out to be galaxies.
The Blanco telescope has calculated the distance and orbital characteristics of DeeDee, which is three times farther from the Sun than Pluto. However, then astronomers were unable to calculate its size and determine other physical characteristics. For that purpose, the scientists used ALMA - Atacama Large Millimeter Wave Grille. This radio telescope, consisting of 66 antennas, detects thermal radiation emanating from celestial objects.
It turned out that the diameter of DeeDee reaches 635 kilometers, which is one third less than Ceres - the dwarf planet closest to the Sun. According to the researchers, at this size, this object must have sufficient mass to have a spherical shape. In this case, it also represents a dwarf planet. The surface temperature of DeeDee is 30 Kelvin, or minus 243 degrees Celsius. The object reflects only 13 percent of the light incident on it.