Haumea has two known satellites, an unusually high spin rate, and is also the “parent” of a large family of icy bodies in the outer solar system that used to be chunks of its surface, but which now orbit the Sun on their own. This is despite original evidence that suggested they both formed in similar giant impacts and adds to the mystery shrouding how these icy bodies formed. Ragozzine (FIT), NASA, JHU, SwRI.Haumea, a dwarf planet on the edge of our solar system, doesn’t have the same kind of moons as its well-known cousin Pluto according to a new study. NASA’s New Horizons probe gathered the pictures of Pluto and its moons, but no such pictures exist of the other dwarf planets and their moons, so the sizes, shapes, and colours are all best estimates. Burkhart, Ragozzine, and Brown 2016 searched Hubble Space Telescope data and would have discovered Haumean moons as small as Pluto’s in almost all orbital configurations. These large bodies in the outer solar system share many similarities, but one difference is that only Pluto has a collection of tiny moons shown near the centre. A comparison of the four icy dwarf planets and their moons, with all objects to scale.
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