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The research, led by Kobe University professor Tadashi Mukai along with researcher Patryk Lykawka, will be published in the April issue of the US-based Astronomical Journal.
Their study comes two years after school textbooks had to be rewritten when Pluto was booted out of the list of planets.
Pluto was discovered by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 in the so-called Kuiper belt, a chain of icy debris in the outer reaches of the solar system.
In 2006, nearly a decade after Tombaugh's death, the International Astronomical Union ruled that the celestial body was merely a dwarf planet.
Astronomers concluded that Pluto's oblong orbit overlapped with that of Neptune, excluding it from being a planet.