Quaoar

Quaoar is the name for a planet-like inhabitant of the Kuiper Belt debris zone lying beyond Neptune. Spotted first as a mere dot of light, it has now been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a plum for students of the solar system: with a diameter of 1300 km and a distance of 4 billion miles from Earth, Quaoar is the largest solar-system object to be measured since Pluto was discovered in the 1930s and the farthest-out to be resolved by a telescope. The finding was announced yesterday by Caltech scientists at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Alabama.