| This
is an artist's impression of the icy Kuiper belt object 2002 LM60, dubbed
"Quaoar" by its discoverers. With the help of NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope, astronomers have determined that Quaoar (pronounced kwa-whar)
is the largest body found in the solar system since the discovery of Pluto
72 years ago. |
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Quaoar
is about 1300 km in diameter and is about half the size of Pluto. Like Pluto,
Quaoar dwells in the Kuiper belt, an icy debris field of comet-like bodies
extending 7 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. Quaoar is the farthest
object in the solar system ever to be resolved by a telescope. It is abou
t6.5 billion km from Earth, more than 1 billion miles farther than Pluto.
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