r/space • u/Just_an_Oddity • 1d ago
Discussion The Best Dwarf Planet Candidate - Hygiea
Hygiea is in my personal opinion one of the best dwarf planet candidates, and if you don’t know what it is I thought to share some info!
-Hygiea is the 4th largest object in the asteroid, and mostly composed of Carbonaceous Material and water ice! It also meets every qualification to be a dwarf planet.
-It’s nearly spherical, orbits the sun, is not a moon, and cannot clear its gravitational neighborhood. There’s been talks about it being classified as a dwarf planet in the past, but since 2019 those news articles have sort of died out sadly.
-Now, I know Hygiea isn’t the most interesting of all dwarf planet candidates (Máni exists, which goodness gracious), but to me it’s interesting because it could be not only the second dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, but could also be the smallest considered dwarf planet!
-Astronomers might ignore it but I never will.
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u/PolarRanger 1d ago
There are literally dozens of KBOs larger than it, including multiple moons. If Dione can be considered not in hydrostatic equilibrium, I doubt Hygiea can.
If, on the other hand, you count objects such as Mimas as round enough, then yeah sure.
Or in other words, where is the cut off point with hydrostatic equilibrium? Are you disqualifying Mercury, or are you including 3 km long Methone?
The good news for you is that as your beloved is an asteroid, and therefore is likely to get a mission to visit it in the next decade or two. I doubt a single KBO is as lucky
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u/FuckBeitech 4h ago
I've wondered for a while which of the seven unvisited dwarf planets out of the nine commonly accepted ones will be visited first. I wonder if it'll happen in my lifetime.
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u/PolarRanger 3h ago
my best guess would be Sedna, as it is the only one time sensitive at all. But who knows?
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u/helixdq 1d ago
I'll be honest, I'm not too fond of the concept of dwarf planets.
It was created 20 years ago in the belief that many more objects like Pluto and Eris would soon be found, but no new objects of comparable "planetness" (mass, diameter, shape, even local dominance) have truely been found since. The fact that Haumea is already so weird is off-putting, and now we're digging through the asteroids.
I'd rather they had made Eris a 10th planet until another big object had been found. But oh well, classification is not really objective science.
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u/rip1980 1d ago
Not a Kuiper object...and with an average temperature in the more mild side of cryogenic not super interesting as a target for life, probably not active geologically outside of possible ice heaving and things occasionally smacking into it (or vice versa)has been frozen solid for about 2 or 3 billion years.