10th planet found, astronomers say

LOS ANGELES -- Astronomers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new planet larger than Pluto in orbit around the sun.

The discovery in the outlying regions of solar system was made with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory, planetary scientist Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

The unnamed planet would be the 10th in the solar system, although there are scientists who dispute the classification of Pluto as a planet.

The discovered object is the farthest-known object in the solar system, Caltech said in a statement. Its location is currently 97 times the distance between the sun and Earth.

Brown made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory and David Rabinowitz of Yale University.

The object was first photographed on Oct. 31, 2003, but it was so far away that its motion was not detected until data was analyzed again this January. The scientists have since been studying the object.

''It's definitely bigger than Pluto," Brown said in a statement.

He said scientists are ''100 percent confident that this is the first object bigger than Pluto ever found in the outer solar system."

The research was funded by NASA.