Haumea [ Mike Brown's Planets ]

Mike Brown's Planets ^ | Wednesday, September 17, 2008 | Mike Brown

[SunkenCiv]

On December 28th, 2004, I discovered a Kuiper belt object brighter than anything anyone had ever seen before. Being only a few days after Christmas, I naturally nicknamed it Santa... How would I have known back in 2004 that Santa would be the single most interesting object ever discovered in the Kuiper belt? It has a moon -- wait, no, two moons! It is oblong, sort of like a football (American style) that has been deflated and stepped on. And it rotates end over end every 4 hours, significantly faster than anything else large known anywhere in the solar system... Stranger still, Santa has the density of a rock... What if, eons ago, Santa was an even larger Kuiper belt object and it got smacked -- in a glancing blow -- by another Kuiper belt object? That would explain the fast spin. And the fast spin would be enough to explain the oblong shape; anything spinning that fast would be pulled into such a big stretch... While looking across the Kuiper belt at many different objects, we realized that a small number of objects in the Kuiper belt look like tiny little chunks of ice. How strange. Even stranger, though, was that all of these chunks of ice were, relatively speaking, next-door neighbors of Santa. We had found the other chunks that had been removed from the mantle of Santa.

[SunkenCiv]

Update to the Santa asteroid story, which has been posted a number of times. Brown's declamation of the hijacking of a discovery by a different group is also in here.

[SunkenCiv]

Haumea Hebenstreit Ho
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1832353/posts?page=5#5

[SunkenCiv]

santa mike brown site:freerepublic.com

Google

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic ·

[SunkenCiv]

Brown sez it was an impact that did it. :')

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic ·

[Monkey Face]

Interesting!
I’d read that a couple of days ago on the Space emails I get.