Although “What is a planet?” seems like a simple question, it turns out it’s anything but. You could go by the ancient meaning of the word. Planetes means “wanderers” in ancient Greek ...

Quaoar's ring was spotted using the European Space Agency's orbiting Cheops telescope, whose primary purpose is to study planets beyond our solar system, as well as ground-based telescopes.

More information: J. P. Emery et al, A Tale of 3 Dwarf Planets: Ices and Organics on Sedna, Gonggong, and Quaoar from JWST Spectroscopy, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.15230 ...

They published their work in The Astrophysical Journal. The Kuiper Belt is populated by dwarf planets like Quaoar, shown in this illustration, and smaller chunks of rock and ice.

But just how big can these planets get, and what's the biggest planet we know of? Prior to 1992, when the first exoplanet was discovered, the gas giant Jupiter, which is about 11 times as wide as ...

In 2013, a two-ring system was discovered around the Centaur object Chariklo. Then, a ring around the dwarf planet Haumea was discovered in 2017. Using data from stellar occultations between 2018 and ...

The dwarf planet is about 555 kilometers (345 miles) in radius and is roughly 43 times as far from the Sun as Earth. Quaoar is orbited by a small moon, called Weywot, of about 160 kilometers (100 ...

Why It Matters Scientists still do not fully understand how dust and gas in the early solar system coalesced into moons and planets. Like the first ring around Quaoar, announced by a team of ...

Quaoar orbits the Sun at a distance of about 43 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun). It is so distant that its rings are impossible to observe directly.

The dwarf planet Quaoar sports a ring that lies outside the orb’s Roche limit, an invisible line beyond which rings aren’t thought to be stable, Lisa Grossman reported in “This dwarf planet ...

The small, icy world was named for the creator god of the Tongva, an indigenous people from Southern California, where the dwarf planet was discovered. Quaoar is approximately 1,100 kilometers in ...