What is Quaoar?

McGruff

Space News Briefs By Warren Ferster Compiler Caltech Scientists Discover Object Half As Large As Pluto Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have discovered a Kuiper belt object half the size of Pluto, a finding expected to raise further questions about Pluto's status as a planet. The spherical object, dubbed Quaoar by the scientists who first spotted it in a digital sky image taken June 4 with a 1.2 meter telescope at Palomar Observatory, is the largest object to be discovered in the solar system since Pluto's discovery in 1930. 'Quaoar definitely hurts the case for Pluto being a planet,' said Mike Brown, a Caltech associate professor who, along with post doctoral researcher Chad Trujillo, made the discovery. 'If Pluto were discovered today, no one would even consider calling it a planet because it's clearly a Kuiper belt object.' Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-o-ar) is named after the creation force of the Tongva tribe that originally inhabited the Los Angeles basin where Caltech is located. This is a cache page from Google: http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:uiS5QPILkNsC:www.space.com/spacenews/spacenews_briefs.html+Quaoar and hl=en and ie=UTF-8 Oct 08 02, 4:21 PM