Dwarf planet
Makemake
A bright Kuiper Belt dwarf planet with a 22-hour day.
Makemake orbits the Sun about every 305 to 308 years in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune. Its orbit is tilted about 29 degrees to the planets. It spins in roughly 22 and a half hours, a day similar in length to Earth's and Mars's.
How it moves
- Makemake orbits the Sun about once every 307.5 years at roughly 45.6 AU.
- Its orbit is inclined about 29 degrees with an eccentricity of 0.159.
- It rotates once in about 22.5 hours.
- A small, faint moon nicknamed MK 2 was spotted orbiting it by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Facts
- Mean radius
- 714 km
- Mass
- 3.100e+21 kg
- Surface gravity
- 0.4 m/s²
- Rotation period
- 22.49 hours
- Orbital period
- 112,329 days
- Average distance from the Sun
- 45.571 AU
- Eccentricity
- 0.1589
- Known moons
- 1
- Discovered
- March 31, 2005, by Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz at Palomar Observatory
Makemake's discovery team nicknamed it Easterbunny because it was found just days after Easter.
Sources: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov, ssd-api.jpl.nasa.gov, science.nasa.gov