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Haumea (minor-planet designation: 136108 Haumea) is a dwarf planet located beyond Neptune's orbit. It was discovered in 2004 by a team headed by Mike Brown of Caltech at the Palomar Observatory, and formally announced in 2005 by a team headed by José Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain, who had discovered it that year in precovery images taken by the team in 2003.
A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve orbital dominance like the eight classical planets of the Solar System. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept ...
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown. Estimates have run as high as 200 in the Kuiper belt and over 10,000 in the region beyond. However, consideration of the surprisingly low densities of many large trans-Neptunian objects, as well as spectroscopic analysis of their surfaces, suggests that the number of dwarf planets may be much lower, perhaps only nine among bodies ...
Artist's depiction of Haumea's ring system. A ring around Haumea, a dwarf planet and resonant Kuiper belt member, was revealed by a stellar occultation observed on 21 January 2017. This makes it the first trans-Neptunian object found to have a ring system. [31] [32] The ring has a radius of about 2,287 km, a width of ≈ 70 km and an opacity of ...
Quaoar ( minor-planet designation: 50000 Quaoar) is a large, ringed dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a region of icy planetesimals beyond Neptune. It has an elongated ellipsoidal shape with an average diameter of 1,090 km (680 mi), about half the size of the dwarf planet Pluto.
Pluto ( minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Sedna (minor-planet designation: 90377 Sedna) is a dwarf planet in the outermost reaches of the Solar System, orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune.Discovered in 2003, the planetoid's surface is one of the reddest known among Solar System bodies.
Eris ( minor-planet designation: 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System. [22] It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in the scattered disk and has a high- eccentricity orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory –based team led by Mike Brown and verified later that year.