June 13, 2003

On October 7, 2002, NASA announced its Hubble Space Telescope had discovered the largest object in the solar system since the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Caltech astronomers Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown, using the Hubble, detected the object "2002 LM60" in June 2002. 2002 LM60, about 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away from Earth and 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, is the most distant object in our solar system ever observed by a telescope.

2002 LM60 is one of about 600 known solar orbiting objects beyond Neptune in what is called the Kuiper Belt, and thus is defined as a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). The Kuiper Belt is an icy debris field of asteroids and comet-like bodies, and thus is similar to the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter.

Brown used the Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys to determine 2002 LM60's diameter to be about 800 miles (1300 kilometers). Only Hubble can provide the sharpness needed to actually resolve the disk of this asteroid, leading to the first-ever direct measurement of the true size of a Kuiper belt object (KBO).

Breaking away from the tradition of naming solar objects from Greek and Roman mythology, Trujillo and Brown dubbed the KBO "Quaoar" (pronounced kwa-whar). Quaoar is a creation god of the Tongva tribe (also called the San Gabrielino Native Americans), the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin. According to legend, Quaoar created order out of chaos by singing and dancing the deities, and then the world's inhabitants, into existence.

Although hailed by some as the tenth planet, or Planet X, Quaoar, at about half the size of Pluto, is too small to be considered one. In fact, many scientists are beginning to redefine Pluto as the largest KBO rather than a planet in its own right.

Some also suspected that Quaoar was the Sumerian "Nibiru," discussed in Zecharia Sitchin's book, The Twelfth Planet, and others in his Earth Chronicles series. However, Nibiru was said to be about the size of Jupiter, which is massive (Jupiter's equatorial diameter is 11 times that of Earth), and to have one revolution around the Sun for every 3600 of ours. Quaoar's year is estimated as being 285 of our years. (1)

The search for Planet X and Nibiru continues.


References:

1. FAQs about Quaoar



For more information see:

FAQs about Quaoar

HubbleSite

Science at NASA

The Age

Space News