Haumea: The Weirdest Beast In The Wild Zoo Of The Kuiper Belt

It should be common knowledge by now that the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies that extends well beyond the orbit of Neptune, is home to some of the strangest objects in our solar system. Within this region are trillions of comets, asteroids, and large planetoids such as Pluto, Eris, and Makemake—a veritable planetary zoo, in short. But one of its strangest oddities of all is probably that represented by what was once known as 2003 EL61, an object capable of summing up in itself some truly unique features.

This distant outpost of the solar system travels in orbit with an average distance from the Sun of about 43 AU, or 6.45 billion km, going from a perihelion of 34.6 AU to an aphelion of 51.6 AU, and taking a whopping 183 years to complete an entire revolution. A decidedly eccentric orbit, but one that nonetheless places EL61 in the category of so-called classical KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects), which differ from scattered objects—a category to which the more famous Eris belongs, i.e., those KBOs with highly elliptical and highly inclined orbits, probably thrown into their present orbits through gravitational interactions with giant planets.

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Credits: Ron Miller, Mark A. Garlick / MarkGarlick.com ,Elon Musk/SpaceX/ Flickr

00:00 Intro
00:29 2003 EL61
04:48 Haumea
05:50 Moons
14:45 Do the rings have anything to do with the shape

#insanecuriosity #haumea #dwarfplanet

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