Curated category
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…
- Hiʻiaka (moon)Hiʻiaka is the larger of two known moons circling the dwarf planet Haumea, and it briefly went by another name: Rudolph.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- Triton (moon)Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, was spotted by an English brewer just seventeen days after Neptune itself was found.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 10199 Chariklo10199 Chariklo sits in the cold dark between Saturn and Uranus, roughly 250 kilometers across, quietly circling the Sun every 62.5 years.
- 541132 LeleākūhonuaAstronomers David Tholen, Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard spotted a faint point of light on the 13th of October 2015. They were using the Subaru Telescope…