There were no other planetary bodies in the OnOff system, and ancient astronomers had confirmed the moonlessness of the single world in the system.

Then two American astronomers, working at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, Calif., took a look on four nights last week and confirmed the discovery.

By now, the astronomers have confirmed the presence of 440 high-red shift galaxies existing just a few billion years after the Big Bang.

Only a few decades later, the astronomer, Sir William Herschel, confirmed his idea by painstakingly cataloguing the positions and distances of vast numbers of stars.

A month later, astronomers at the Goddard center and in France made similar observations and confirmed the findings.

However, no other astronomer has ever confirmed Pickering's claim.

He ran the computer programs that calculated possible orbits for the asteroids and posted them on a Web site so that other astronomers could confirm the locations.

Eighteen years later astronomers confirmed the existence of the real-life Kuiper belt.

In a separate paper describing the star-formation history in M81, astronomers confirmed that massive spiral galaxies formed most of their stars in the early universe.

"Our astronomers have confirmed that it will orbit at the same distance as the Moon itself, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away."