Quaoar

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Quaoar

The largest known Kuiper Belt object, discovered in June 2002 by Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology using the 1.2-meter Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory. With an estimated diameter of about 1250 km, it is more than 30% larger than (1) Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, and is larger in volume than all the known asteroids put together. It is half the diameter of Pluto but has only 12½% of its volume. Quaoar, which takes its name from the creation mythology of the Tongva, a native American people who once inhabited the area around present-day Los Angeles, orbits the Sun in about 285 years at a mean distance of 42 AU. Its orbit is inclined at an angular of 8° to the ecliptic and has an eccentricity of less than 0.04.