Quaoar: animated discovery images | KBO 01 | ||
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Quaoar is a newly discovered Kuiper Belt object, and is the largest Kuiper Belt object currently known. It is half the diameter of Pluto (about 1/8 the volume), and 1.6 billion km further away than Pluto. | ||
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Image Credit: Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown, Caltech; Oschin Telescope at Palomar, California. | |||
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This
sequence of images is compiled from the three discovery images that were
taken of the same patch of sky, with 90 minutes between them. These pictures
are about 150th of the entire field available with the telescope. Quaoar is at about 42 AU away from us, more distant than Pluto and Neptune, which are both at about 30 AU. So Quaoar is about 6 billion kilometers from us. At walking speed, it would take you about 100,000 years to get there. Going at the speed the Space Shuttle orbits the earth, it would take 25 years to get there. It takes light 5 hours to get there from the Sun. |
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Quaoar
is in a nearly circular orbit. It's eccentricity (a measure of the ellipticity
of a circle) is less than 0.04, meaning that it's distance from the sun
only changes by about 8% over the course of a Quaoar year (which is 285
Earth years). This is very different from Pluto, which has an eccentricity
about 6 times larger. You can see its orbit below. Because this object is
so bright, within a month of discovery we were able to trace Quaoar's position
back two decades in survey data. Quaoar's orbit is also inclined to the
ecliptic (the plane of the solar system), by about 8 degrees. The Tongva people (sometimes called the San Gabrielino Native Americans) inhabited the Los Angeles area before the arrival of the Spanish and other European people. The name "Quaoar" (pronounced kwah-o-wahr) comes from their creation mythology. |
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