Haumea - Kuiper Belt object at opposition

[lukebl]

136108 Haumea is a Kuiper Belt object which was at opposition in Bootes last week, so I had a go at capturing it and measuring its light curve. My memory is terrible, as I've just noticed that I did the same thing a couple of years ago and posted it here on SGL but had completely forgotten.

Here it is anyway. What's interesting is that it has an ellipsoid shape and rotates fast (4 hours). In fact it's one of the fastest rotating large objects in our solar system. It also has rings and two known moons. There was a bit of a controversy about its discovery by Caltech in 2004. A Spanish team got wind of the discovery before it was officially announced and speedily rummaged through some earlier images and pre-discovered it, and claimed it. They later admitted they had accessed the Caltech observation logs but denied any fraud, stating they were merely verifying whether they had discovered a new object. Yeah sure.

Despite its vast distance, 49.5 Astronomical Units (Pluto is virtually nearby at just 34 AU distant), its movement was visible in this 3 hour stack of 4 minute exposures. Atik428ex, 200mm f/5 Newtonian. The bright star is mag 4.8 20 Bootis.

Here's the light curve. Quite distinctive, with a range of about a third of a magnitude from about 17.1 to 17.4 over the evening.

Here's its orbit and current position

Edited April 22, 2020 by lukebl

[Ant]

Very nice, an impressive achievement for sure.

My 7 year old is obsessed with kuiper belt objects - he will love seeing this image.

Love it!

Ant

[andrew s]

Very nice observation.

Regards Andrew 

Edited April 22, 2020 by andrew s