In the name of Science

  Today is the anniversary of the birth, at Houston, Texas on 10 Jan 1936, of the American radio astronomer Robert Woodro w Wilson.    A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, he is best remembered for being the co-discoverer in 1964, along with the German-born American physicist and radio astronomer Arno Allan Penzias, of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped to establish the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In recognition of the discovery, Wilson and Penzias were presented with the Henry Draper Medal (awarded by the United States National Academy of Sciences) in 1977 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.   Image From google images  Credit: societyforthehistoryofastronomy.com

Today is the anniversary of the discovery, on 5 Jan 2005 by astronomers Michael E. Brown, Chadwick A. Trujillo and David L. Rabinowitz, of the dwarf planet Eris , a trans-Neptunian object with a diameter of around 2,325 kilometres (1,445 miles) and which orbits the Sun once every 557 years. Eris lies at an average distance from the Sun equal to around 1.72 times that of Pluto and has one known moon, Dysnomia, seen here just to the left of Eris on an image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007. Eris is notable in that it has been found to have a mass greater than Pluto, eventually leading to Pluto's demotion from planet status in August 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded Pluto to a ‘dwarf planet’.