Quaoar

Examples

• All

• If you are sentimental and want to preserve Pluto's planetary rank, then in all fairness you must add Quaoar to the club, as well as any other yet-to-be-discovered orb that out-planets Pluto.

  Academic text (2003)

• If it turns out that Snow White does indeed have methane, it will join Quaoar as one of only two dwarf planets that straddle the border between the handful of objects large enough to hold onto volatile compounds and the smaller bodies that make up the vast majority of KBOs.

  Blog text (33)

• A couple of billion years after Quaoar formed, it began to lose its atmosphere to space; now, all that remains is some methane.

  Blog text (33)

• There is, however, one other dwarf planet that's both red and covered with water ice: Quaoar, which Brown helped discover in 2002.

  Blog text (33)

• Pluto is indeed a planet, but so are Ceres, Varuna, and Quaoar.

  Academic text (2003)

• This artist's conception of Quaoar is courtesy of NASA and G. Bacon (STScI).

  Academic text (2004)

• Slightly smaller than Snow White, Quaoar is still big enough to have had an atmosphere and a surface covered with volcanoes that spewed an icy slush, which then froze solid as it flowed over the surface.

  Blog text (33)

• But because Quaoar isn't as big as dwarf planets like Pluto or Eris, it could not hold onto volatile compounds like methane, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen as long.

  Blog text (33)

• The object, unofficially named Sedna, is thought to be about two-thirds the size of Pluto and larger than Quaoar (pronounced "KWAH-wahr"; relative to Pluto, the largest Kuiper Belt object found so far).

  Academic text (2004)

• Discovered in 2002, Quaoar is a large planetoid located in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto.

Surface Forms

Etymology