BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Haumea - Facts for Kids *new*

Out in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune and even farther away than Pluto, lie products of an ancient collision - they include a dwarf planet and its two moons.

Haumea - Facts for Kids

Here is an artist's rendering of Haumea with its moons Hi'aka (below the dwarf planet) and Naumaka. [Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)]

In fact, we can't image distant Haumea with that much detail. Astronomers have to fill in the surface details with information gathered from the spectrum and from the infrared. Here is an actual image of Haumea and moons taken with the Keck telescope in 2003. Hi'aka is above haumea and faint Naumaka below. [Credit: CalTech, Mike Brown et al.]

An artist's concept of Haumea and its narrow, dense ring. We don't know exactly what it looks like, but the proportions in this drawing are accurate, and the ring is shown darker than Haumea's bright surface. [Credit: IAA-CSIC / UHU]

In this animation you can see how odd Haumea's orbit is compared to Neptune's. The eight planets of the Solar System are pretty much in the same plane, called the ecliptic. (Imagine them all rolling around the Sun on a giant invisible table!) Here you can see that Haumea's orbit is not only highly elliptical, but strongly tilted out of the ecliptic. The animation shows the dwarf planet's orbit from 2000 to 2300.

Credit: Phoenix7777 from data source HORIZONS System, JPL, NASA