QB1
On August 30th 1992 astronomers David Jewitt and
Jane Luu discovered the first Trans Neptunium object. It was the first of the
Kuiper belt objects that had been predicted by Gerald Kuiper back in the late
1940s.
Although we take these Kuiper belt object discoveries for
granted today with over 1500 now having been discovered including Eris which
caused Pluto to be demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006 none were known before
1992. QB1 is not very big being only around 125 km across, and takes nearly 290
years to orbit the Sun once.
It was suggested that the object be called smiley because
the book Smileys People was being read at the time in the observatory at Mauna
Kea in Hawaii, but because there was already an asteroid called smiley that
never happened. Today the object is just known as QB1.
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