{"id":2963,"date":"2023-02-09T06:15:30","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T00:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=2963"},"modified":"2025-03-26T09:26:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T03:56:46","slug":"what-is-quaoar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/what-is-quaoar\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Quaoar?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Key facts about Quaoar:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Quaoar is a <strong>dwarf planet<\/strong> that\u2019s <strong>located in the<\/strong> <strong>Kuiper Belt <\/strong>at the solar system\u2019s edge.<\/li>\n<li>It is about <strong>697 miles wide<\/strong> (1,121 kilometers).\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>It is roughly <strong>one-twelfth the diameter of Earth<\/strong>, one-third the diameter of the Moon, and <strong>half the size of Pluto<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Quaoar is <strong>greater in volume than all known asteroids combined<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Quaoar has its <strong>own moon<\/strong>, the 100-mile-wide (160 km) <strong>Weywot<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Its surface is <strong>moderately red<\/strong> and <strong>composed of low-density ices mixed with rock.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It takes about <strong>288 years <\/strong>for Quaoar <strong>to go once around the sun<\/strong> in a roughly <strong>circular orbit.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>What is Kuiper Belt?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Kuiper belt, also called the <strong>Edgeworth-Kuiper belt<\/strong>, is a <strong>flat ring of small icy bodies<\/strong> that <strong>revolve around the Sun<\/strong> <strong>beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>There are millions of <strong>these icy objects, collectively referred to as Kuiper Belt objects<\/strong> (KBOs) <strong>or trans-Neptunian objects<\/strong> (TNOs), in this belt.<\/li>\n<li>The Kuiper Belt is a <strong>region of leftovers from the solar system&#8217;s early history.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It is thought to be the <strong>source of most of the observed short-period comets<\/strong>, particularly those that orbit the Sun in less than 20 years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1)\u00a0What is a dwarf planet?<\/h3>\n<p>According to the definition adopted by the IAU in 2006, a dwarf planet is, \u201ca celestial body orbiting a star that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity but has not cleared its neighboring region of planetesimals and is not a satellite.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2023\/feb\/08\/ring-discovered-around-dwarf-planet-quaoar-confounds-theories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Ring discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar confounds theories<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quaoar is a dwarf planet that\u2019s located in the Kuiper Belt at the solar system\u2019s edge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2964,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2963","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}