What is haumea known for?

Haumea: The Quirky Dwarf Planet That’s Shaped Like a Football

Out in the icy boondocks of our solar system, far beyond Neptune, lies a real oddball: Haumea. Officially, it’s designated as a dwarf planet (minor-planet designation: 136108 Haumea) and hangs out in the Kuiper Belt. But trust me, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill icy rock. Haumea’s got some seriously strange quirks that make it stand out from the crowd.

First off, its discovery is a bit of a he-said-she-said situation. A team led by Mike Brown at Caltech spotted it back in 2004, even giving it the festive nickname “Santa” because it was so close to Christmas. But then, a Spanish team led by José Luis Ortiz Moreno announced their discovery a year later, after finding it in some older images. Awkward! Eventually, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stepped in and gave it the official name Haumea, after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility. Why Hawaiian? Because its moons were discovered at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea – a nice nod to its origins.

But the real kicker with Haumea? It looks like a squashed football! Seriously, it’s not round like most planets. Its dimensions are roughly 2,322 × 1,704 × 1,138 km. All that stretching and squashing comes from its crazy-fast spin. This dwarf planet is a speed demon, whipping around on its axis in just under 4 hours. Can you imagine? Any faster, and scientists think it might just fly apart!

And get this: unlike most of its Kuiper Belt buddies, which are just big ice balls, Haumea is mostly rock with a thin icy coating. This makes it surprisingly dense – one of the densest objects out there in the Kuiper Belt, actually. Plus, that icy surface is super reflective, making it as bright as fresh snow. There’s even a mysterious “Dark Red Spot” on its surface, which might be a peek into what’s going on inside.

But wait, there’s more! Haumea isn’t a loner; it has two moons, Hi’iaka and Namaka, both named after Haumea’s daughters. Hi’iaka, the bigger of the two, is a good-sized chunk of rock and ice, orbiting Haumea every 49 days. Namaka, the little one, is much closer in and zips around much faster.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Haumea also sports a RING! Yep, it’s the first Kuiper Belt object we’ve found with its own ring system. This ring is pretty narrow and lies in the same plane as Haumea’s equator and Hi’iaka’s orbit. It’s like Haumea is showing off, saying, “Yeah, I’m a weird, fast-spinning, football-shaped dwarf planet with moons AND a ring. What of it?”

Orbit-wise, Haumea takes a whopping 284 Earth years to go around the sun. Its path is a bit tilted compared to the other planets, and it gets as close as 35 AU (that’s 35 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun) and as far as 52 AU.

Scientists think that Haumea and a bunch of other objects out there are actually pieces of a bigger object that got smashed apart in a collision a long, long time ago. This smash-up probably gave Haumea its spin, its shape, and even created its moons.

Sadly, no spacecraft has ever visited Haumea. It’s just too far away and too faint to get a good look. So, for now, we’re stuck studying it from afar with telescopes and computer models. But who knows? Maybe someday we’ll send a probe out there to get a close-up view of this truly bizarre and fascinating dwarf planet.