New Frozen World Found Beyond Pluto

theBrownfury writes "BBC, Sydney Herald, and the Indian Express are reporting a new object, which is one-tenth the diameter of the Earth, and lies well beyond Pluto in an area of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. The new world, which has been dubbed Quaoar, is about 1,280 kilometres (800 miles) across. Quaoar orbits the sun ever 288 years and is 1250 Km wide, about the size of all the asteroids combined. This discovery is being hailed as the most important solar system discovery in the past 72 years."

Comments

Is it really?

[joyoflinux]

This article at TheAge disputes whether this object is really a planet...

Re:Is it really?

[Pedrito]

Yeah, they're still trying to decided if Pluto is a planet. Really, though, it's a matter of semantics. Either way, it's a big rock that circles the sun. That can be said about a few of the other planets.

It's still a cool discovery.

Re:Aw shucks

[PD]

It's pronounced Qwa O Wahr. Three syllables.

Discoverer's home page URL

[cje]

Here is a link to the Quaoar FAQ, maintained by Chad Truijillo, one of the planet's co-discoverers. There's a lot of cool stuff there, including the discovery images (animated so you can see it moving across the star field), the Hubble images, information about the orbit, etc.

Re:Pluto Not A Planet?

[kalidasa]

Pluto is the threshold case. At the moment, it seems to be the conventional wisdom that anything found that's larger than Pluto will have to be considered for planet status, and anything smaller for planetoid/asteroid/comet status. Quaoar would thus not be a planet. But who knows? The important thing is that a solar system can have these kinds of objects:
Stars (Sun)
Brown dwarfs (none known in our system)
Gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
Terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars)
Asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, etc.)
Kuiper-like objects (Pluto, Quoaoar, maybe Chiron)
Comets (maybe Chiron, Halley, etc.)
Terrestrial moons (the Moon, Io, Europa, Titan, Iapetus)
Kuiper-like-object-like moons (Charon, maybe Triton)
Asteroid-like moons (Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea)
Dust lanes and planetary rings
Protostars, protoplanets, protoplanetary disks
etc.

As you can see, the star/planet/asteroid/comet/moon classification isn't quite detailed enough for what we now know.

A few short facts about Quaoar

[Jugalator]

- Around half the size of Pluto (and there's been dispute if Pluto is a planet).

- 5% of the sky was looked at before finding Quaoar, so there might very well be a dozen more Quaoar-sized "planets" in the Kupier belt. Even Pluto-sized planets might be out there.

- Water, methane, methanol, and carbon dioxide ice seem to exist on Quaoar.

- Quaoar's name isn't decided yet and its designation is 2002 LM60 until a name is officially decided upon in a few months.

- Quaoar is pronounced "kwah-o-wahr" and is the name of a great force of creation among the Tongva people.

- Quaoar is 42 AU from Earth, while Pluto and Neptune are both 30 AU from Earth. 1 Astronomical Unit = One "Sun to Earth" distance.

- If standing on Quaoar, what one would see at the Sun (and the Earth) would be what happened 5 hours ago, since light takes 5 hours to travel to Quaoar.

- A Space Shuttle would need 25 years to travel to Quaoar.

- Google News about Quaoar.