SEE SPOT SPIN: An impression of what the dwarf planet Haumea's dark, red spot might look like.
Image: P. LACERDA
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Haumea, the mini planet whose detection set off an international and as yet unresolved war of words in 2005 between the two teams claiming its discovery, is back on the astronomy scene with more intrigue.
An elongated oddball, Haumea is roughly the same diameter as Pluto, with whom it shares the three-year-old "dwarf planet" designation. It spins exceedingly fast, rotating once every 3.9 hours, which may explain the fact that it resembles an American football. And perhaps most interestingly of all, Haumea has a spot on one side that could provide clues to its history, says Pedro Lacerda, an astronomer at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Lacerda presented his work on Haumea this week at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany.
When the dwarf's discovery was announced in 2005, it set off a firestorm of controversy between two teams of researchers. The Spanish team who first presented Haumea was quickly accused of an ethical breach when computer records showed that the group had apparently accessed data by a U.S.-based team that had been tracking the object for months. The International Astronomical Union has not settled the issue.
More recently, observations performed by Lacerda and his colleagues in 2007 revealed a telltale variation in the dwarf planet's reflected brightness as it spins. "The object is egg-shaped, so when you see it sideways it reflects more sunlight than when you see it tip-on," Lacerda says. But the peak reflectance varies from one side to the other, revealing the presence of a dark spot on the dimmer side. "It's as if you were looking at a football that is white, but one of the sides has a spot on it, so it looks darker overall," Lacerda explains.
What is more, the spot reflects more red light than blue light, meaning it has a reddish tint in the visible spectrum. That tint could result from a local concentration of red-reflecting organic compounds or blue-absorbing minerals on Haumea's icy surface.
In January, Lacerda published the results of an infrared survey of Haumea to build on the optical studies that turned up the dark red spot. That second examination turned up a variation in the reflectance band associated with water ice, thought to make up the bulk of the Haumean surface, at the mysterious surface feature. That variation could be explained, Lacerda says, by ice in crystalline, rather than amorphous, form.
Haumea resides far away in the solar system in a region called the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy bodies that extends roughly from the orbital path of Neptune out to the farthest reach of Pluto's orbit. In that distant region, Lacerda explains, ice usually takes the amorphous form, a random molecular arrangement that occurs during rapid freezing in extremely low temperatures. But if ice were temporarily heated and allowed to refreeze, it could take its more ordered crystalline structure.
"The fact that I think I find more crystalline water on the spot means that the temperature on the spot may have been a little bit higher in the past, so it may have been heated right there," Lacerda says. The source of the heat could have been the impact of a small object—perhaps a dark, reddish one bearing organic molecules—which could explain many of the spot's features, as could an impactor that excavated Haumea's inner minerals, the contents of which are unknown.
If the spot indeed proves to mark an impact crater, astronomers could be afforded a peek into the dwarf planet's interior. But Lacerda acknowledges that crystalline water is only one possible interpretation of the infrared data. "It's all very speculative," he says.
"The problem is we don't know how big the spot is," Lacerda says. Haumea is so far away—farther than Pluto, even—that its features cannot be resolved in any detail. Astronomers have to rely on its bulk properties to make inferences about its specifics, in this case tracking the total amount of light Haumea reflects to uncover details about the spot. "It could be very big and not very different in color, just slightly red and slightly darker than the object, or it could be much smaller but much redder and much darker."
Lacerda has booked time next March on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile with hopes of unraveling some of the mysteries of Haumea and its spot. Using the VLT, he and his colleagues will have higher-resolution measurements of the dwarf planet's light spectrum, which could help narrow the field of possible explanations. "That's the exciting thing," Lacerda says. "Maybe we'll be able to tell what the spot is really made of."
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17 Comments
Add CommentThis is fascinating, but please do not blindly accept the controversial demotion of Pluto as fact when it is not. It is just one interpretation, adopted by four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists, and it was opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by New Horizons Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPluto and Haumea are both small planets because they are spherical, meaning they are rounded by their own gravity, a condition known as hydrostatic equilibrium, and they orbit the sun. This definition gives our solar system 13 planets and counting: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
Thanks laurele, great comment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi find the debate on Pluto fascinating , you would think it would be defined either way. what i have always wondered is why its orbit is so messy and wobbly and juxtapossitioned (unlike other planets) and can a ball of ice technically ever be a planet. but what do i know;-))
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe properties of these objects are much more interesting than what humans might decide to call them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEach scientific advance makes it harder for further advancement, and there is likely an intellectual barrier out there every bit as inaccessible as a temp of absolute zero or the speed of light to matter with mass. As we approach it, if we are to stay in business, we must fall back on matters we can actually get excited about, like the definition of the terms we have long accepted without need for debate. Science is full of inconsequential minutiae waiting to be explored in more detail. Despair not!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy would a ball of ice not be considered a planet when we have four huge balls of gas that are considered planets? Then, if balls of gas weren't planets, why would a rocky planet wrapped in an envelope of gas be? And, since the centres of the gas giants are probably solid at that pressure, what exactly is the difference again?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe point is where do you draw the line? Apparently they have and thus Pluto was demoted.
An American football or an English rugby ball? Is chauvinism the goal? This one is out of all their leagues.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA possible way to understand parts of the so called Darwins theory may be to try to walk in the shoes of Gregory Mendal who preceeded him by a few years. Gregory very simply made choices of which pea plant to breed with what pea plant and kept careful records as to what the effects were from each breeding and then try to form a theory that explained what the results were.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGregory was of course a monk devoted to Religion but simply tried to layout a theory that would explain what occurred rather than concluding that the changes that occured were due to Gods will. Instead he found from his observations and careful note taking, logical explanations for the changes in his peas, and found some of the relationships that exist between what you have and what you would get from certain choices of breeders to cross. and was actually able to predict what would happen when certain peas were bred with certain other peas other than taking the easy way out and attributing the results as gods
will.
One question I have about Gregorys work is how did he control what pollen from which plant was responsible for fertilizing which stigma from another plant? In other words how did he know what actually occured. In recent years, due to what we learned as a result of mendils work we know that fertilization is the result of a single set of genes with a similar set of genes forming a diploid cell and going on to develop as a new individual.
As a result we know that part of the puzzel lies in the haploid set of genes known as pollen and the merging of this pollenes haploid set of genes with the haploid set of genes that reside in the pistol to form the diploid needed to create the seed. So we can employ various methods of collecting specific pollen with a tiny brush or pollen extractor from a specific plant and manually place it on the stigma of the plant we want to pollenize. Gregory on the other hand probably did not have a clue that the pollen and the stigma both had haploid genes and that brining together the specific pollen with the specific stigma would allow the creation of a diploid cell which would then form a seed that would express the various gene combinations of the haoloid parent donors.
So, How did Gregory Mendil know. When we know what he knew that perhaps we will know enough to speculate where we are going in Gregorys shoes, and conjure up a theory of how Mendils work influnced Darwin????
"Shazbot," Egg shaped mini-planet so we finally found planet Ork where Mork was from, now to make contact. "Na-Nu Na-Nu"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSHAPED LIKE THE VESICA PISCES?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIS THE SPOT THE PORPORTIONS OF THE GOLDEN MEAN?
IS ITS ORBITAL PATH SIMULARE TO CERES?
VALERY SOMIETY
I agree but I truely believe that cere is whats left over of a planet as tidus-boyd and phi spacing would strongly suggest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisValery Somiety
Valery Somiety
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience is supposed to be purely observation and an attempt to explain what was observed. All anomalies should be recorded and presented as is; regardless if they smash current theorems or support them. I’m a proponent of Tidus-Boyd’s planetary spacing, and believe we put on ignore some of the most basic observation. I.E. Phi.
Valery Somiety
If the Hubble Space Telescope can gather images of distant galaxies, what kind of image of Haumea can it see?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't we have anything out there that can do a fly/by or use one of our super expensive off world telescopes for a peek?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaumea and the other dwarf planets aren't planets because they haven't "cleared the neighborhood" of its gravatational orbit. Haumea is most likely got ice and crystalline water ice in its interior. It may have an ice cap creating the spot?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisan interesting post, but how did it find its way to a series of comments on a new planet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not a physicist or astronomer, so can someone please enlighten me as to how a celestial body can be other than round? I can accept potato-shaped asteroids, as they're just rocks, but I would think a larger object would have to be more ball-like.
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