Blogtrek

Quaoar

Everyone knows that Pluto is a planet, or is it? It is so much smaller than the smallest planet Mercury. If Pluto is a softball, then Mercury is a soccer (or foot) ball. But it is so much larger than anything else. Not any more. Pluto is now known to be a Kuiper Belt object, a collection of large asteroids beyond the orbit of Neptune. Other Kuiper Belt objects are known; for example, Pluto's own satellite Charon. There are others, such as Varuna and Ixion. These two worlds are slightly bigger than Ceres, the largest Mars-Jupiter asteroid. Just recently another Kuiper Belt object was discovered to be even larger than Varuna and Ixion; it was named Quaoar and it is 777 miles across, or about the size of the Great Lakes region in the USA and Canada. This is so large compared to Pluto that it is hard to claim that Pluto is a planet. One would then have to call Quaoar a planet; then one would have to call Varuna and Ceres planets, and so forth until we have thousands of planets. It is easier to call Pluto not a planet but a huge asteroid; the biggest in the Kuiper Belt, although what would happen to the claim of Pluto being a planet if a Kuiper Belt object bigger than Pluto were found?

By the way: Quaoar. It is pronounced sort of like you have a speech impediment: kua-o-are. Where did it come from?it differs from quasar in just a single letter. It is from Los Angeles county Native American myth; a good description, from, is: "Their only god who came down from heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, out the world on the back of seven giants. He then created the lower animals,” and then mankind." I think they mean "cut the world". But the quotation, from www.angelfire.com/journal/cathbodua/Gods/Qgods.html, shows a progression from chaos to order, the opposite of Coyote's direction; Coyote introduced disorder when he scattered the stars all over the place. As such, then, this asteroid represents order, something that Kuiper Belt objects don't seem to have.