From its fast-spinning rotation, to the fact that it looks like a football, and more!
Join me as I detail for you Haumea Facts and history: The fast spinning dwarf planet!
8.
What Is Haumea?
Despite our solar system being one that is very much in depth in terms of public knowledge
about what's out there, there are a few things that don't exactly make the headlines, and
Haumea is one of them.
Why is that?
Because it's a dwarf planet.
A dwarf planet is one that has shape of a planet in part or in whole, and has the size
to match up to one in part, but it just a bit smaller and has other issues and thus
doesn't meant the true qualifications of a true planet.
Haumea is found in the Kuiper Belt that is just beyond the planet Neptune.
Two teams claim credit for its discovery.
Mike Brown and his team at Caltech discovered Haumea in December 28, 2004 on images they
had taken on May 6, 2004.
On July 20, 2005, they published an online abstract of a report intended to announce
the discovery at a conference in September 2005.
At around this time, José Luis Ortiz Moreno and his team at the Instituto de Astrofísica
de Andalucía at Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain found Haumea on images taken on March
7–10, 2003.
Ortiz emailed the Minor Planet Center with their discovery on the night of July 27, 2005.
Brown initially conceded discovery credit to Ortiz, but came to suspect the Spanish
team of fraud upon learning that his observation logs were accessed from the Spanish observatory
the day before the discovery announcement.
These logs included enough information to allow the Ortiz team to precover Haumea in
their 2003 images, and they were accessed again just before Ortiz scheduled telescope
time to obtain confirmation images for a second announcement to the MPC on July 29.
Ortiz later admitted he had accessed the Caltech observation logs but denied any wrongdoing,
stating he was merely verifying whether they had discovered a new object.
Precovery images of Haumea have been identified back to March 22, 1955.
IAU protocol is that discovery credit for a minor planet goes to whoever first submits
a report to the MPC (Minor Planet Center) with enough positional data for a decent determination
of its orbit, and that the credited discoverer has priority in choosing a name.
However, the IAU announcement on September 17, 2008, that Haumea had been named by dual
committee established for bodies expected to be dwarf planets, did not mention a discoverer.
The location of discovery was listed as the Sierra Nevada Observatory of the Spanish team,
but the chosen name, Haumea, was the Caltech proposal; Ortiz's team had proposed "Ataecina",
the ancient Iberian goddess of spring, which as a chthonic deity would have been more appropriate
for a plutino.
It's ironic to find teams of people vying for the rights of discovery, but that is indeed
what happened here and because of that, Haumea has a bit more of a controversial history
than other "true planets" in the solar system.
7.
Size and Distance With a radius of about 385 miles (620 kilometers),
Haumea is about 1/14 the radius of Earth.
If Earth were the size of a nickel, Haumea would be about as big as a sesame seed.
This is one of the reasons why it's called a "Dwarf Planet" because while it has an impressive
size, it doesn't measure up to the other planets of the solar system.
The irony of this is many fold, not the least of which is that there have been several "updates"
to the size and radius and dimensions of Haumea as a whole.
While no one doubts its elongated shape (which we'll be touching on in a sec), the dimensions
on all its side have been conflicting depending on who you talked with.
Including 2017 and 2019 studies trying to figure out what the true dimensions are.
From an average distance of 4,010,000,000 miles (6,452,000,000 kilometers), Haumea is
43 astronomical units away from the Sun.
One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth.
From this distance, it takes sunlight 6 hours to travel from the Sun to Haumea.
This is rather long compared to the Earth where it takes mere minutes to reach us.
Thus why it's much colder in the solar system the farther that you go out into the distance.
6.
Orbits And Rotations Haumea is a bit curious when it comes to its
orbits and rotations.
It takes 285 Earth years to make one trip around the Sun.
However, as Haumea orbits the Sun, it completes one rotation every 4 hours, making it one
of the fastest rotating large objects in our solar system.
Think about that for a second, this object has a "day" in about 1/6th the time the Earth
does.
So that would mean if you did an 8-hour shift at work, Haumea has already clocked two days
in the record books.
That's incredibly fast, which is why many study it because that's an impressive amount
of speed to go that fast in place.
It is possible a massive impact billions of years ago set off Haumea's spin and created
its moons.
But more on those later.
The other thing to note here is that the rotation of a planet can affect its shape, and because
Haumea is spinning so fast, its shape is quite literally elongated.
So if you were to look at it from its side in the length version, you would say that
it doesn't look like a true planet, it looks like a football.
Which is most definitely a shape that not many people associated with a planet, and
yet, it happens more than you think in the grand scale of the universe.
It just depends on the forces put upon it, including its own rotation and the gravity
of the sun exerted on it.
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5.
Moons The fact that Haumea has moons is a bit ironic.
Mainly because there are planets like Mercury and Venus that don't have moons at all, and
they are full planets, while a dwarf planet like Haumea has two.
The two in question were discovered around Haumea through observations using the W.M.
Keck Observatory by a Caltech team in 2005.
The outer and larger of the two satellites was discovered in January 2005, and formally
designated S/2005 (2003 EL61) 1, though nicknamed "Rudolph" by the Caltech team.
The smaller, inner satellite of Haumea was discovered during June 2005, formally termed
S/2005 (2003 EL61) 2, and nicknamed "Blitzen" (get it?
They're named after reindeer!).
On 7 September 2006, both satellites were numbered and admitted into the official minor
planet catalogue as (136108) 2003 EL61 I and II, respectively.
Eventually though, they got more "appropriate" names in 2008 via Hiʻiaka and Namaka.
Each moon was named after a daughter of Haumea, the Hawaiian goddess of fertility and childbirth.
Hiʻiaka is the goddess of dance and patroness of the Big Island of Hawaii, where the Mauna
Kea Observatory is located.
Nāmaka is the goddess of water and the sea; she cooled her sister Pele's lava as it flowed
into the sea, turning it into new land.
In her legend, Haumea's many children came from different parts of her body.
The dwarf planet appears to be almost entirely made of rock, with only a superficial layer
of ice; most of the original icy mantle is thought to have been blasted off by the impact
that spun Haumea into its current high speed of rotation, where the material formed into
the small Kuiper belt objects in Haumea's collisional family.
There could therefore be additional outer moons, smaller than Namaka, that have not
yet been detected.
It'll be up to other astronomers to go and see where they are if they do indeed exist.
4.
The Surface Of Haumea In 2005, the Gemini and Keck telescopes obtained
spectra of Haumea which showed strong crystalline water ice features similar to the surface
of Pluto's moon Charon.
This is peculiar, because crystalline ice forms at temperatures above 110 Kelvin, whereas
Haumea's surface temperature is below 50 Kelvin, a temperature at which amorphous ice is formed.
In addition, the structure of crystalline ice is unstable under the constant rain of
cosmic rays and energetic particles from the Sun that strike objects like these.
The timescale for the crystalline ice to revert to amorphous ice under this bombardment is
on the order of ten million years, yet trans-Neptunian objects have been in their present cold-temperature
locations for timescales of billions of years.
Radiation damage should also redden and darken the surface of trans-Neptunian objects where
the common surface materials of organic ices and tholin-like compounds are present, as
is the case with Pluto.
Therefore, the spectra and colour suggest Haumea and its family members have undergone
recent resurfacing that produced fresh ice.
However, no plausible resurfacing mechanism has been suggested.
Making its surface one of the biggest mysteries of the dwarf planet, and further proof that
more study is needed on it and about it.
Haumea is as bright as snow, with an albedo (or reflectivity amount) in the range of 0.6–0.8,
consistent with crystalline ice.
Other large objects like Haumea such as Eris appear to have albedos as high or higher.
Best-fit modeling of the surface spectra suggested that 66% to 80% of the Haumean surface appears
to be pure crystalline water ice, with one contributor to the high albedo possibly hydrogen
cyanide or phyllosilicate clays.
Inorganic cyanide salts such as copper potassium cyanide may also be present.
However, further studies of the visible and near infrared spectra suggest a homogeneous
surface covered by an intimate 1:1 mixture of amorphous and crystalline ice, together
with no more than 8% organics.
The absence of ammonia hydrate excludes cryovolcanism and the observations confirm that the collisional
event must have happened more than 100 million years ago, in agreement with the dynamic studies.
The absence of measurable methane in the spectra of Haumea is consistent with a warm collisional
history that would have removed such volatiles.
This means that more research is required to figure out just how this surface came to
be how it is, and answers could potentially highlight other properties of not just this
dwarf planet, but other entities in the Kuiper Belt.
3.
Formation Haumea is a member of a group of objects that
orbit in a disc-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper Belt.
This distant realm is populated with thousands of miniature icy worlds which formed early
in the history of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.
These icy, rocky bodies are called Kuiper Belt objects, transneptunian objects, or plutoids.
As for how Haumea itself was formed, and how it would get its shape and rotation is a bit
up for debate.
Mainly because given the nature of the Kuiper Belt and how there are numerous objects of
various size within it, there are many ways it could have been formed.
Many feel that it was a collision event within the belt that set it apart, as well as giving
it the two moons that we talked about earlier.
It's also possible that it was lumped together like many other rocks and asteroids and even
planets in our solar system, there is no true way of knowing.
Though given the constantly evolving picture of our universe and how it was formed, there
is potential that there are even more options to what really happened.
And should they be discovered, it could reveal more not just about Haumea, but the formation
of the Kuiper belt as well.
2.
The Ring A discovery in 2017 indicated the presence
of a ring around this dwarf planet.
This represents the first ring system discovered for an object like Haumea.
The ring has a radius of about 2,287 km, a width of ~70 km and an opacity of 0.5.
It is well within Haumea's Roche limit, which would be at a radius of about 4,400 km if
it were spherical (being nonspherical pushes the limit out farther).
The ring plane approximately coincides with Haumea's equatorial plane and the orbital
plane of its larger, outer moon Hiʻiaka.
The ring is also close to the 3:1 resonance with Haumea's rotation.
The ring is estimated to contribute 5% to the total brightness of Haumea.
In a study about the dynamics of ring particles published in 2019, Othon Cabo Winter and colleagues
have shown that the 1:3 resonance with Haumea's rotation is dynamically unstable, but that
there is a stable region in the phase space consistent with the location of Haumea's ring.
This indicates that the ring particles originate on circular, periodic orbits that are close
to, but not inside, the resonance.
This is a fascinating find because you wouldn't expect an object like Haumea to have a ring,
and it's fair to say that many never thought a dwarf planet like this could have a ring.
But indeed it does, and that opens up many possibilities.
1.
Future Discoveries of Haumea If not obvious, Haumea is still somewhat of
a mystery to astronomers in terms of its attributes, its history, and everything that it represents.
In many ways, it should not exist like it does, and yet...it does.
And it raises many interesting questions about what else is in the Kuiper Belt, and what
it could mean for our solar system as a whole.
No doubt some would like to land on the dwarf planet to get a closer look, but that's unlikely
at the present time.
So until that point, we'll just keep looking at the dwarf planet and keep trying to determine
more about it.
Thanks for watching!
What did you think of this look at Haumea and its history, its facts, and more!
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Which ones did you not know before?
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