Curated playlist
Objects observed by stellar occultation
- HaumeaHaumea is a dwarf planet so strange that astronomers initially struggled to believe what they were seeing. Spinning faster than any other large body in the Solar System, its surface gleams as bright as fresh snow, and it sits in the frozen…
- Hiʻiaka (moon)Hiʻiaka is the larger of two known moons circling the dwarf planet Haumea, and it briefly went by another name: Rudolph. Its discoverer had already nicknamed the world it orbits Santa, so the reindeer name got passed down to the moon that…
- Vanth (moon)Vanth is the only known moon of Orcus, a large dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune, and it sits in a place so remote that its apparent magnitude from Earth is about 22 - roughly one-ninth the brightness of its own host planet. When…
- PlutoPluto sits roughly 39.5 AU from the Sun, so far away that sunlight takes 5.5 hours just to reach it. When Clyde Tombaugh spotted a faint moving speck on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29, 1930, he had no idea he was about to…
- UranusUranus tips over on its side as it travels. Its axis is tilted 82.23 degrees, nearly parallel to the plane along which it orbits the Sun. The result is a world where each pole bakes in roughly 42 years of unbroken sunlight, then plunges…
- MakemakeMakemake is a dwarf planet drifting in the frozen outer reaches of the Solar System, so far from Earth that even the most powerful telescopes see it only as a pinprick of light. That light, however, hints at something extraordinary.…
- Eris (dwarf planet)Eris, minor-planet number 136199, upended the Solar System's address book in a single announcement on the 29th of July 2005. Here was an object beyond Neptune, more massive than Pluto, initially described by NASA as a tenth planet. Its…
- Triton (moon)Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, was spotted by an English brewer just seventeen days after Neptune itself was found. William Lassell had built his own telescope, a 61-centimeter aperture metal mirror reflector nicknamed the "two-foot"…
- 2 Pallas2 Pallas sits in the asteroid belt as the third-largest asteroid in the Solar System, and it has been hiding in plain sight since the night of the 5th of April 1779. That evening, the astronomer Charles Messier recorded it on a star chart…
- Ceres (dwarf planet)Ceres sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it has been classified as a planet, demoted to an asteroid, and upgraded again to dwarf planet, all within the span of two centuries. On the 1st of January 1801, Giuseppe…
- Charon (moon)Charon is the largest moon of the dwarf planet Pluto, and it is strange in almost every way a moon can be. Its mean radius is 606 km, which makes it more than half as wide as Pluto itself. That size ratio is unlike anything else in the…
- 10199 Chariklo10199 Chariklo sits in the cold dark between Saturn and Uranus, roughly 250 kilometers across, quietly circling the Sun every 62.5 years. For decades, it was treated as just another minor body in a sparsely populated region called the…
- 541132 LeleākūhonuaLeleākūhonua has a visual magnitude of 24.64, placing it in roughly the same faint range as Pluto's smaller moons. Three American astronomers found it on the 13th of October 2015. The letters in its provisional designation, combined with a…