Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade

Dec 12, 2012 03:00 AM ET

10. Pluto-Sized Eris Rocks Solar System
In January 2005, Mike Brown and his team at Palomar Observatory, Calif. discovered 136199 Eris, a minor body that is 27 percent bigger than Pluto. Eris had trumped Pluto and become the 9th largest body known to orbit the sun.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided that the likelihood of finding more small rocky bodies in the outer solar system was so high that the definition "a planet" needed to be reconsidered. The end result: Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Pluto acquired a "minor planet designator" in front of its name: "134340 Pluto."
Mike Brown's 2005 discovery of Eris was the trigger that changed the face of our solar system, defining the planets and adding Pluto to a growing family of dwarf planets.

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Elaborate Neanderthal Structure Found

Human May 28, 2016 05:45 PM ET Elaborate Neanderthal Structure Found Neanderthals built some of the world's earliest constructions, which were just found deep in a French cave. Circular heated structures built by Neanderthals have been discovered deep inside a cave in France and are now among the world's oldest known human-made constructions, a new study has found. The structures, dated to around 176,000 years ago and described in the journal Nature, provide evidence that Neanderthals were clever about using fire, had complex spatial organizational abilities, and explored at least one extensive cave system. They additionally indicate that humans began occupying caves much earlier than previously thought; until now the oldest formally proven cave use dated back only 38,000 years (Chauvet). The site where the constructions were found -- Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France -- was only just...

Shi Cheng, the lion city under water.

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