In early October, a large object was found in the Kuiper Belt. Chad Trujillo and Michael E. Brown discovered the object and temporarily named it Quaoar. Quaoar (pronounced kwah-o-wahr) is the god of creation from the tribe of Tongva that once lived in San Gabrelino in Southern California. The temporary official name is 2002LM60.

The astronomers first spotted it in June using a 48-inch Oschin Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain. Images taken on July 5 and August 1 with the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Advanced Camera for Surveys measured the disk at 1,255 kilometers (778 miles), give or take 190 kilometers (118 miles). Radio-wavelength observations confirmed the results. The new object is about the size of Pluto’s moon Charon.

Quaoar was found in the Kuiper Belt, located far past Neptune with many small objects left over from when the solar system formed. Most of the objects in the Kuiper Belt are dark and hard or impossible to see. Scientists believe the objects are covered with black-as-coal compounds. Quaoar was different and has a surface reflectivity of 10%. Quaoar travels in a roughly circular orbit about 44 astronomical units from the sun. (Remember an astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to the Earth, about 93 million miles.)