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Haumea – Dwarf planet · Kuiper Belt
Image: José Antonio Peñas/SINC (edited by PlanetUser) · CC BY 3.0
🪨 Dwarf planets · The Little Worlds

Haumea

Dwarf planet · Kuiper Belt

Haumea is one of the fastest-spinning large objects in the Solar System, completing a full turn in about 4 hours. All that spinning has stretched it into an egg shape. It is covered in crystalline water ice and has its own ring.

  • ~2,100 km longYou could line up 6 of them across Earth.
  • ~3.9 hoursDay
  • 2: Hiʻiaka and NamakaMoons
🔭 Find it in the sky

Take a closer look

A family from a crash

Haumea has a family of smaller icy objects travelling on similar paths around the Sun. Scientists think they are pieces knocked off in a giant collision long ago – the same crash that may have set Haumea spinning so fast. It was the first family like this found in the Kuiper Belt.

Reading a flicker

From Earth, Haumea is just a faint dot, yet astronomers know its shape. As it spins, its brightness rises and falls: brighter when its long side faces us, dimmer when its narrow end does. Timing that flicker reveals both how fast it spins and how stretched it is.

A very long year

Haumea takes about 284 Earth years to go once around the Sun. Its oval path carries it between roughly 35 and 51 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. Since it was found in 2004, it has travelled less than a tenth of the way around.

Size it up

EarthHaumea

You could line up 6 of them across Earth. Both are drawn to the same scale.

How we found out

  1. 2004–05

    Two teams – one led by Mike Brown in the USA and one led by José Luis Ortiz in Spain – both find it. Who found it first is still debated.

  2. 2008

    Named after Haumea, the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth. Its moons are named after her daughters.

  3. 2017

    Astronomers watch Haumea pass in front of a star and discover it has a ring – the first found around a trans-Neptunian object.

🤔 Something to wonder about

Why would spinning make something egg-shaped?

See it yourself

Only with large telescopes.

Got it?

Mark Haumea as explored to earn 10 XP.