Frozen World Beyond Pluto Discovered

By Kim Farnell

Hooray, our solar system is finally metric!

Astronomers announced on Monday 7th October that they have discovered an icy world 800 miles across, the biggest solar system find since Pluto was first spied in 1930. Michael Brown and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo unveiled their discovery Birmingham, Alabama, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's division of planetary sciences.

Chadwick Trujillo used a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to spot the object in images taken on June 4th. Follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed its size. Archival research showed Quaoar (pronounced kwah-o-wahr), was imaged as early as 1982, but never noticed. Brown and Trujillo poured over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun.

The object is about one tenth of the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles - 1 billion miles farther out than Pluto. Astronomers do not consider it a planet, but one of the largest of billions of objects in a swarm of primordial material that orbits the sun beyond Neptune. Quaoar is the latest large object to be found in the solar system's Kuiper Belt. The belt contains frozen, fossil remnants of swirling debris that clumped together to form the solar system roughly 5 billion years ago. It is also believed to be the source of some comets. The belt contains as many as 10 billion objects at least one mile across; astronomers estimate five to 10 of those are jumbo-sized like Quaoar. Unlike Pluto, its orbit around the Sun is very circular, even more so than most of the planetary-class bodies in the solar system.

Quaoar is about 1250 km in diameter, roughly the size of Pluto's moon Charon. Although smaller than Pluto, Quaoar is greater in volume than all the asteroids combined (though probably only one-third the mass of the asteroid belt, because it's icy rather than rocky). Quaoar's composition is theorized to be largely ices mixed with rock, not unlike that of a comet, though 100 million times greater in volume.

Quaoar is at about 42 AU away from us, more distant than Pluto and Neptune, which are both at about 30 AU. 1 AU is an Astronomical Unit equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, about 150 million kilometres. So Quaoar is about 6 billion kilometres 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.

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. Quaoar's orbit is also inclined to the ecliptic (the plane of the solar system), by about 8 degrees.

This latest large KBO is too new to have been officially named by the International Astronomical Union. Trujillo and Brown have proposed naming it after a creation god of the Tongva native American tribe, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin.

Quaoar, the great force of creation sings and dances the high ones into existence. While Quaoar has no form or gender he is usually referred to with the male pronoun. He dances and sings first Weywot who becomes Sky Father; they sing and dance Chehooit Earth Mother into existence. The trio sing Tamit Grandfather Sun to life. As each divine one joins the singing and dancing, the song becomes more complex and the dance more complicated. In turn Moar, Grandmother Moon, Pamit the Goddess of the sea, Manit, the Lord of dreams and visions, Manisar the bringer of food and harvests, Tukupar Itar Sky Coyote, Tolmalok, the Goddess of Shishongna (the underworld) join in the singing, dancing and creating. And finally the great seven giants who hold up the worlds are created. The High Ones in turn are aided by Eagle, Duck, Bear, and Frog in a grand earth diving story. Frog brings up soil out of the deep dark sea, and the four animals dance it flat and wide. The Gods and Goddesses then furnish the world Tovangar with hills, mountains, trees, rivers, etc. Tobohar (first man) and Pahavit (first woman) are also part of this great Creation song and dance cycle.

The name Quaoar is not the official name until the International Astronomical Union votes on it. This will happen in a few months, but historically, the discoverer's suggestions for new minor planet names have been followed. Until then, the object's provisional designation is 2002 LM60.

It is very likely that there are more big Kuiper Belt Objects like Quaoar. Only 5% of the entire sky was looked at before finding Quaoar. So there could be 20 Quaoars out there and we wouldn't have seen them yet. It is also likely that a few Plutos are out there waiting to be discovered. It's likely that the discovery rates will go down as we get further and further from the the ecliptic.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering launching a spacecraft to explore Pluto, its moon, Charon, and at least one Kuiper Belt object, but whether it will be funded remains unclear. The New Horizons mission could launch as early as 2006, and would take about a decade to reach Pluto.

Arguments are already beginning about what the new planet should be called. The traditional name for the Sun's tenth planet is Persephone.Science fiction, and speculative non fiction articles over the lasts few decades have referred to the tenth planet as Persephone, on the assumption that we would continue naming major astronomical objects for ancient Roman mythological figures. However, Persephone is the Greek name for the goddess called in Latin Proserpina.

Quaoar is a name from mythology, which makes it consistent with the names of the minor planets and moons (which do not need to be named after Roman gods; the moons of Uranus are named after characters from Shakespeare : e.g., Oberon and Titania from Much Ado About Nothing, and Ariel and Miranda from The Tempest). Also there already exists 399 Persephone, the main belt asteroid discovered by M Wolf at Heidelberg in 1895.

In Douglas Adam's Mostly Harmless, a tenth planet was discovered. "What had happened was this: Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was some tediously heart-warming story attached to this - and that was all very wonderful and lovely."

Adams was clearly aware of what a tenth planet could mean to astrology. "Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before. That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it? What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be rethought? Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig-farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the boysenberry flavour on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing."

And so we have 2002 LM60 - presently called Quaoar by its discoverers. The force of creation that dances the gods into existence. Or do we have Persephone who had to stay in Hades for half the year (when the world grows cold), and gets to come out the other half (when the world warms up again). Or Rupert - meaning shining with fame.

An ephemeris for Quaoar can be found at http://www.astro.com/swisseph/quaoar.htm

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