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At long last, this freaky thing way out in the Kuiper Belt, formerly just known as 2003EL61, officially has a name, as do its two moons, now known as Hi'iaka and Namaka.
It's highly unusual in that, even though it's big enough to have a shape determined by gravity and rotation (and therefore dwarf-planet status), it's not a sphere or even an oblate spheroid—it's spinning so fast for its gravity that it's taken a triaxial shape, like a partly used bar of soap tumbling end over end. I don't think I know enough about the hydrostatics of rapidly rotating bodies to entirely understand this, but I guess it makes some sense that there would be a transition regime between the spheroidal shape we're accustomed to, and the object totally breaking up into smaller bodies. It does remind me of superdeformed atomic nuclei.
I think the official naming was held up for a while by the priority/data-snooping controversy, which also hastened Brown's announcement of the infamous dwarf planet Eris and the resulting fighting over the status of Pluto. I guess the IAU decided to give Brown's group the discoverer's naming privileges.
It's highly unusual in that, even though it's big enough to have a shape determined by gravity and rotation (and therefore dwarf-planet status), it's not a sphere or even an oblate spheroid—it's spinning so fast for its gravity that it's taken a triaxial shape, like a partly used bar of soap tumbling end over end. I don't think I know enough about the hydrostatics of rapidly rotating bodies to entirely understand this, but I guess it makes some sense that there would be a transition regime between the spheroidal shape we're accustomed to, and the object totally breaking up into smaller bodies. It does remind me of superdeformed atomic nuclei.
I think the official naming was held up for a while by the priority/data-snooping controversy, which also hastened Brown's announcement of the infamous dwarf planet Eris and the resulting fighting over the status of Pluto. I guess the IAU decided to give Brown's group the discoverer's naming privileges.