15760 Albion

• 1. Introduction

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  15760 Albion was discovered in 1992 by David C. Jewitt and Jane X. Luu at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. It became the first trans-Neptunian object found after Pluto and Charon. After the discovery, Jewitt and Luu nicknamed it Smiley, and the press briefly hailed it as a tenth planet. Yet the object we now call Albion needed a different name and a fresh scientific classification. Decades of study would still leave only a rough sense of its size.

• 2. Naming a Primeval Giant

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  Albion, the name chosen for object 15760, comes from the mythology of William Blake (1757-1827), an English poet and painter. In Blake's mythology, Albion is the island-dwelling primeval man. His division produced The Four Zoas: Urizen, Tharmas, Luvah or Orc, and Urthona or Los. The name Albion itself traces back to an ancient, mythological name for Britain. Jewitt and Luu had first suggested the name Smiley, but it was already taken by asteroid 1613 Smiley, honoring American astronomer Charles Hugh Smiley. The object carried the catalog number 15760 but stayed nameless for years. It was still known casually as QB1, a label ambiguous without its discovery year attached. The Minor Planet Center published the official naming citation on the 31st of January 2018. That same QB1 label would soon lend its own quiet twist to how astronomers named an entire class of distant worlds.

• 3. Birth of the Cubewano

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  The designation QB1 hides a code: decoded, it shows Albion was the twenty-seventh object found in the second half of August 1992. Astronomers later used that same QB1 label to coin a new term, cubewano, for objects sharing Albion's kind of orbit. Albion itself belongs to the cold classical Kuiper belt, one of several distinct populations found beyond Neptune. By January 2018, astronomers had found around 2,400 further objects beyond Neptune, most of them classical Kuiper belt objects like Albion. Within a year of Albion's discovery, other astronomers began finding worlds sharing its same distant, icy orbit.

• 4. A Belt Beyond Pluto

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  In 1993, astronomers found several objects in similar orbits: (15788) 1993 SB, (15789) 1993 SC, (181708) 1993 FW, and (385185) 1993 RO. Within twenty years of Albion's discovery, astronomers found over a thousand bodies orbiting the Sun between about 30 and 50 astronomical units. This work revealed a vast belt of icy bodies stretching far beyond just Pluto and Albion themselves. By 2018, researchers had catalogued over 2,000 Kuiper belt objects in total. Yet even as that belt filled with newfound neighbors, Albion's own size and shape stayed remarkably hard to pin down.

• 5. An Unmeasured World

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  A generic magnitude-to-diameter conversion puts Albion's width at about 167 kilometers, or 107 miles, assuming an albedo of 0.9 and a magnitude of 7.0. Mike Brown offers a smaller figure, estimating a mean diameter of about 108 kilometers, or 66 miles. Brown considers Albion too small to be a dwarf planet candidate, judging the chances "probably not." As of 2021, no rotational lightcurve for Albion had been obtained from photometric observations. Its rotation period, pole orientation, composition, and shape all remain unknown, open questions for the astronomers who continue to study this distant world.