On July 11th, the IAU assigned the first new name to a "plutoid" other than Pluto and Eris: the body formerly known as 2005 FY9, nicknamed "Easterbunny" due to its discovery near Easter, has now been named Makemake, after the Easter Island creator deity (thus maintaining the Easter connection). At least by the IAU's definitions, we now have four official, named dwarf planets. I assume that a name for the other qualifying "plutoid," 2003 EL61, will follow fairly soon.
Makemake is the third-largest known trans-Neptunian object, about 2/3 the diameter of Pluto and less than half the mass. It hasn't been conclusively observed to be spheroidal, but it's four times the mass of Ceres, so there's no reason to doubt that it is. It's a classical Kuiper Belt object, in the region not gravitationally affected by Neptune's orbit (unlike Pluto). Its semimajor axis is 45.79 AU, about 6.3 AU beyond Pluto's, but with a lower eccentricity; it sometimes comes closer to the Sun than Pluto does, but its maximum distance is greater than Pluto's ever gets. It also has an orbit more severely inclined than Pluto's, by 29 degrees instead of 17. Its surface composition seems to be similar to Pluto's, and it's the only one of the four largest known trans-Neptunian objects to have no moons, making its exact mass difficult to determine.
The name is pronounced "mah-kay mah-kay," of course, not "make-make."
Makemake is the third-largest known trans-Neptunian object, about 2/3 the diameter of Pluto and less than half the mass. It hasn't been conclusively observed to be spheroidal, but it's four times the mass of Ceres, so there's no reason to doubt that it is. It's a classical Kuiper Belt object, in the region not gravitationally affected by Neptune's orbit (unlike Pluto). Its semimajor axis is 45.79 AU, about 6.3 AU beyond Pluto's, but with a lower eccentricity; it sometimes comes closer to the Sun than Pluto does, but its maximum distance is greater than Pluto's ever gets. It also has an orbit more severely inclined than Pluto's, by 29 degrees instead of 17. Its surface composition seems to be similar to Pluto's, and it's the only one of the four largest known trans-Neptunian objects to have no moons, making its exact mass difficult to determine.
The name is pronounced "mah-kay mah-kay," of course, not "make-make."
As far as we know, Makemake has no moon-e-moon-e.
