30 years ago, a telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii discovered an asteroid orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. For more than 60 years only Pluto had been known out there.
1992 QB1, as it is officially called, was discovered by Vietnamese-American astronomer Jane Luu and her British-American colleague David Jewitt.
Only around 150 kilometers in diameter
It is only about 150 kilometers in diameter and orbits even further from the Sun than Pluto. Initially, some even considered it the tenth planet.
In the years that followed, the number of known bodies in the “Kuiper Belt” at the edge of the solar system increased by leaps and bounds. The experts now know more than 2000 objects in this region.
Some are about the size of Pluto. Since it was not possible to count all of them as planets, Pluto has been part of the newly created group of dwarf planets since 2006.
The “happiness” of the ninth planet
The once ninth planet was simply “lucky” that it was discovered in 1930 – at that time the classification as a planet was absolutely correct.
QB1, as experts simply called it for a long time, was eventually named Albion – after a character in the invented mythology of the English writer William Blake. Albion is an old name for Great Britain.
Luu and Jewitt initially named their find “Smiley” – but the smiling face could not be the godfather because there was already an asteroid with that name, named after the astronomer Charles Smiley.