William Atkins
Monday, 22 September 2008 19:02
Science -
Space
Page 2 of 3
This bizarre look is likely due to its very fast rotation: it makes one complete spin about its axis every four hours.
An artist’s drawing based on what astronomers think the dwarf planet looks like up close is found in the USA Today article “
New dwarf planet named Haumea for Hawaiian goddess.”
Haumea makes one complete orbit about the Sun every 104.234 Earth-days, with an average speed of 2.786 miles per second (4.484 kilometers per second).
It also has a high albedo (high reflectivity) due to an outer layer of crystalline water ice on its surface).
Haumea is also a highly dense planet, but only has about 32% of the mass when compared to Pluto.
The new dwarf planet is located among the trans-Neptunian objects, a bunch of cold and rocky objects in the outer reaches of our solar system.
Its elliptical orbit makes its nearest point from the Sun of about 35 astronomical units (AU) and its farthest point about 51.5 AU. (One AU is the average distance between the Sun and the Earth.)
The name for the dwarf planet and its two moons came from Hawai'ian (Hawaiian)
mythology. Please read on for more information.
