http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~chad/quaoar/

As big as Charon. An oar on the river Styx?

How do you pronounce 'Quaoar'?

kwah-o-wahr, according to the website supplied.

From CNN's website:

"The scientific duo named the object Quaoar, pronounced KWAH-o-ar, after the creation god of the Tongva people, a Native American tribe in Southern California. "

__________________
"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

"The Tongva people (sometimes called the San Gabrielino Native Americans) inhabited the Los Angeles area before the arrival of the Spanish and other European people. The name "Quaoar" (pronounced kwah-o-wahr) comes from their creation mythology."

from the text of the linked page


<font size=-1>[ Oops. I didn't see nebularain's post above]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Argos on 2002-10-07 14:00 ]</font>

If Quaoar is a billion miles farther from the sun than Pluto (4.54 billion mi vs. 3.54 billion mi, don't Kepler's laws require its year to be about 359 yrs instead of the Yahoo-stated year of 288 yrs?

T**2 = k x R**3

Quaroar seems to have a much more circular orbit than Pluto does. Pluto actually passes from within the orbit of Neptune to outside the orbit of Quaroar.

I wonder what it's inclination is from the ecliptic plane? If it's very close to it then it would actually make a better planetary candidate than Pluto itself.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

My question is was this new "sphere" predicted? I.E. where there observations in the orbits of Pluto, Charon, and Neptune that did something that caused us to keep searching for what affected them?

If not, then I submit that Pluto/Charon are the problem, not Qu******. Maybe Pluto/Charon are the interlopers in the solar system...

DJ

I wonder how Nancy et all will react to what they will certainly take as the discovery of the "real" planet x.

I wonder why they picked Quaoar, when Persephone, or Rupert would make much better names...

Maybe they should designate the Kuiper belt
the "styx" belt and name everything in it after characters from greco/roman myths about the afterlife.

Hi there,

I also posted a National Geographic news release on this object here.

Here's another story with a
cool "artist's conception" - (which could also stand in for larger Pluto until we get actual pictures.) [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

I heard an interview on NPR with one of the discovery team members which answered a couple of the above questions:
1. The name of the body is required to be a "creation deity", leaving out Persephone and even Rupert.
2. The discovery was made by brute force sky surveying, not by number crunching perturbations in outer planet orbits.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Bob on 2002-10-07 22:49 ]</font>

Incl - 7.9 deg. Ecc - 0.04

Both better than Pluto!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Except for it being one sixth the mass of Pluto.

Bob wrote:
Why?!

"Pluto" is no creation deity... Nor is "Charon"...



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: informant on 2002-10-08 05:51 ]</font>

Pluto was named as a planet, not as a KBO. Charon, as ferryman on the river Styx, is the perfect name for its moon.

PS Clyde Tombaugh was employed by Percival Lowell at the time of his discovery of PLuto. Coincidence?

_________________
Be alert! The world needs more lerts.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kaptain K on 2002-10-08 07:48 ]</font>

I don't think it was a coincidence. On the other hand, Lowell was definitely not Tombaugh's employer. Lowell died when Tombaugh was ten.

What a dreadful name was given to this body.

Actually, this is the worst name that has ever been given to a heavenly body.

What's more, Q has nothing to do with creation. Instead, it brings to the mind the idea of movement, elusiveness and the like. Why the hell people can only think of creation when naming planetary bodies?

Maybe Freud explains...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Argos on 2002-10-08 09:20 ]</font>

Apparently, it has been agreed to name all Kuiper Belt objects --- except for Pluto and Charon --- after creation deities. I wonder if there are enough creation deities in all the religions of the world...

I agree with Argos, Quaoar looks and sounds odd.

Most objects in the solar system were given names from Greco-Roman myhtology, except for Uranus' moons, and the comets. If you start including other mythologies, you'll end up with a very heterogeneous bunch of names. Not to mention that many of them will be close to unpronounceable.

Check out the symbol for Pluto. That's definitely in homage of Percival Lowell.

http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/pluto.html

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: heliopause on 2002-10-08 10:08 ]</font>

While I find the name odd, I applaud the effort to expand the source of names beyond Western civilization. And if you're so concerned about running out of names of creation deities, shouldn't you be even more concerned about running out of Greco-Roman names (particularly since so many of them have already been used)?

In any case, there are plenty of asteroids with other than Greco-Roman names.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

There's ample historical precedent for exceptions that predate an established policy: Trojan asteroids at L4 are named after Greeks, while ones at L5 are named after Trojans (both from the Iliad), except for Hektor (a Trojan), which is at L4. All the geographic elements on Venus have female names, except for Maxwell Montes.

More trivia: I just learned from this page that asteroids with orbits wholly inside the Earth's are usually given Egyptian names, while those with orbits just outside the Earth's are given Aztec or Inca names.

The origin of the name for asteroid 3142, Kilopi, is left as an exercise for the reader. Math majors have an advantage. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

_________________
"... to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson, Ulysses

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ToSeek on 2002-10-08 11:07 ]</font>

The official HST press release on Quaoar

NASA science coverage

_________________
"... to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson, Ulysses

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ToSeek on 2002-10-08 11:09 ]</font>