Earth, Moon, and Planets

, Volume 111, Issue 3–4, pp 127–137 | Cite as

The Size and Shape of the Oblong Dwarf Planet Haumea

  • Alexandra C. Lockwood
  • Michael E. Brown
  • John Stansberry
Article
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

We use thermal radiometry and visible photometry to constrain the size, shape, and albedo of the large Kuiper belt object Haumea. The correlation between the visible and thermal photometry demonstrates that Haumea’s high amplitude and quickly varying optical light curve is indeed due to Haumea’s extreme shape, rather than large scale albedo variations. However, the well-sampled high precision visible data we present does require longitudinal surface heterogeneity to account for the shape of lightcurve. The thermal emission from Haumea is consistent with the expected Jacobi ellipsoid shape of a rapidly rotating body in hydrostatic equilibrium. The best Jacobi ellipsoid fit to the visible photometry implies a triaxial ellipsoid with axes of length 1,920 × 1,540 × 990 km and density \(2.6\) g cm\(^{-3}\), as found by Lellouch et al. (A&A, 518:L147, 2010. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201014648). While the thermal and visible data cannot uniquely constrain the full non-spherical shape of Haumea, the match between the predicted and measured thermal flux for a dense Jacobi ellipsoid suggests that Haumea is indeed one of the densest objects in the Kuiper belt.

Keywords

Haumea Kuiper belt object characterization Hubble space telescope Spitzer space telescope 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Alexandra C. Lockwood
    • 1
  • Michael E. Brown
    • 1
  • John Stansberry
    • 2
  1. 1.Division of Geological and Planetary SciencesCalifornia Institute of TechnologyPasadenaUSA
  2. 2.JWST/NIRCam TeamSpace Telescope Science InstituteBaltimoreUSA

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