49 Fun Facts About Makemake

How does Makemake appear from Earth, even through a large telescope?

A star-like point of light is all any telescope shows, because Makemake is too small and distant to resolve. Astronomers measured its size by timing how long it hid a star in 2011.

In which region of the Solar System does Makemake orbit?

The Kuiper belt is a doughnut-shaped zone of icy bodies beyond Neptune. They are leftovers from the Solar System's birth that never managed to gather into a full-sized planet.

Which of these is wider than Makemake?

The Moon, Earth's own, is more than twice as wide as Makemake. In fact it is bigger than every known dwarf planet, though unlike them it circles a planet, not the Sun.

Makemake's discovery team, led by Mike Brown, was based at which California university?

Caltech, in Pasadena, was home base. The survey telescope worked robotically through the night and sent its images there each morning for Brown's team to search.

What gave Makemake away among the background stars?

Motion: the telescope shot each patch of sky three times over a few hours, and computers flagged whatever had shifted against the fixed stars.

At which observatory was Makemake discovered?

Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope took the discovery images in 2005. A photograph from 1955 turned out to show Makemake too, caught 50 years before anyone noticed it.

What nickname did the discovery team give Makemake before it was formally named?

Easterbunny, because the team found it just a few days after Easter. The joke name had to serve for three years, until the object finally got an official one.

Makemake is named after a creator god from the mythology of which people?

The Rapa Nui saw Makemake as the creator of humanity. Naming rules favour creation-myth names for worlds on orbits like this one, which is why a creator god fitted.

Which of these comes closest to how astronomers pronounce Makemake?

MAH-keh MAH-keh, in four syllables, is the form the IAU gave when it approved the name. Even its discoverer says it another way: Mike Brown wrote that he pronounces it 'Maki-maki'.

What is the smallest kind of instrument that can show Makemake at its brightest?

A high-end amateur telescope is enough, because Makemake peaks near magnitude 17 each March or April, when Earth passes between it and the Sun.

Makemake's namesake created humanity and was the god of what?

Fertility: Mike Brown said he was partial to fertility gods, as his wife was pregnant with their daughter when his team found Makemake. The name took until 2008 to win approval.

Which two other large trans-Neptunian objects had Brown's team found in the four months before Makemake?

Haumea and Eris turned up over the winter of 2004–05, making three big finds in about three months with Makemake. Eris had sat unnoticed in 2003 images until a second look at old data.

The announcement of Makemake and its large neighbours helped push the IAU to do what in 2006?

Reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet: finding worlds of similar size forced the IAU to define 'planet' at last. A planet must clear its orbital neighbourhood, and Pluto has not.

Roughly how long does Makemake take to orbit the Sun?

About 300 years, or 305 to 307 by current measurements. Makemake has covered less than a tenth of one lap since it was discovered in 2005.

At Makemake's average distance, about how long does sunlight take to arrive?

About 6 hours: light that reaches Earth in about 8 minutes needs some 6 hours 20 minutes to get to Makemake, which orbits about 45 times farther out.

Astronomers class Makemake as a 'dynamically hot' object; what does 'hot' describe?

Its orbit: Makemake circles the Sun tilted 29 degrees from the plane of the planets, a sign that Neptune's gravity jostled it long ago. Its surface is anything but hot, at about −240 °C.

Makemake became the fourth recognised dwarf planet in 2008, after which three?

Ceres, Pluto and Eris came first. Eris was named for the Greek goddess of strife, a nod to the row its discovery caused over what counts as a planet.

Makemake belongs to which subcategory of dwarf planets, defined by orbiting beyond Neptune?

Plutoids was a label the IAU coined in June 2008, and a month later Makemake became the third of them. Ceres, in the asteroid belt, is the one dwarf planet left out.

Makemake is the fourth-largest known dwarf planet; which of these is one of the three larger ones?

Haumea ranks third. It spins so fast, once in about four hours, that it has been stretched into a football shape, unlike nearly round Makemake.

What shape do measurements from the 2011 stellar occultation suggest for Makemake?

Slightly flattened at the poles: the timings fit a globe a touch wider at the equator than from pole to pole. A spinning world held together by its own gravity bulges like that.

Why can't astronomers tell whether Makemake's day lasts 11.4 or 22.8 hours?

Its brightness barely varies, by only a few percent per turn, so observers cannot tell whether the faint flicker repeats once or twice in a rotation. That leaves the day at 11.4 hours or double that.

What gives Makemake its reddish-brown tint?

Tholins are tarry organic compounds. They build up when sunlight and cosmic rays break apart Makemake's frozen methane and the fragments recombine into a dark, reddish residue.

Makemake's surface reflects sunlight about as well as which of these?

Snow: Makemake bounces back roughly 80% of the sunlight that reaches it, because a coat of frozen methane keeps its surface bright.

Makemake's surface sits at about −240 °C; which of these is colder still?

Liquid helium, which boils at −269 °C, is the only one colder. Liquid nitrogen poured onto Makemake would freeze solid, since nitrogen turns to ice at −210 °C.

Which two ices do infrared spectra fail to find on Makemake's surface?

Nitrogen and carbon monoxide are both missing, though the same survey found signs of nitrogen ice on Eris. With nothing mixed in, Makemake's methane ice can knit into unusually large, clear grains.

Which space telescope's spectra, taken in 2023, showed the ices on Makemake's surface in fine detail?

James Webb Space Telescope data held a second surprise: methane gas glowing faintly above the ice, the first gas ever detected around Makemake.

Which spacecraft measured how Makemake scatters sunlight at angles unreachable from Earth?

New Horizons, heading out of the Solar System, viewed Makemake from well off to one side of the Sun's direction. From Earth, such distant worlds are only ever seen almost fully lit.

What mostly makes up Makemake's interior?

Ice and rock: at about 1.7 times the density of water, Makemake is too heavy to be ice alone. The rock has probably sunk into a core, leaving layers of water ice above it.

What does the unusually low share of deuterium in Makemake's methane suggest?

A warm interior with hydrothermal chemistry may have cooked up the methane deep inside, then vented it to the surface. A rival study argues the methane is simply primordial.

Which space telescope first reported Makemake's excess mid-infrared emission in 2008?

Spitzer saw more 24-micron heat than so bright and frigid a surface should give off. The puzzle has outlived the telescope itself, which was retired in 2020 with the excess still unexplained.

In 2024, Csaba Kiss and colleagues proposed that Makemake's mid-infrared excess could come from what?

A cryovolcanic hotspot at about 150 K is far warmer than sunlight can make anything that far out. The team's only rival idea was an unseen ring of very fine dust.

If Makemake's methane is venting in plumes, the outflow would rival the jets of which moon?

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, sprays about 300 kg of water vapour a second. Makemake may be shedding a few hundred kilograms of methane a second, though a thin atmosphere would fit the data too.

If Makemake's methane forms a bound atmosphere, how does its surface pressure compare with Earth's?

100 billion times less: about 10 picobars. If the atmosphere is real, it is probably fed by surface ice slowly turning to gas in the feeble sunlight.

What convinced the IAU in 2008 that Makemake was big enough to count as a dwarf planet?

Its sheer brightness was enough: IAU rules treated any world beyond Neptune above a set brightness as a dwarf planet for naming. Its outline was first traced directly in 2011, as it crossed a star.

Compared with Makemake, its moon MK 2 is thought to be far what?

Darker: MK 2 is thought to be charcoal-black beside its bright parent, perhaps because so small a moon cannot hold on to reflective ices, which escape into space.

Which observatory took the images in which Makemake's moon was found?

Hubble Space Telescope images from April 2015 showed the moon as a faint dot beside Makemake. Several earlier searches had come up empty.

What hid Makemake's moon from earlier searches?

Makemake's glare: the moon's orbit is nearly edge-on to Earth, so for much of each circuit it sits almost in line with its dazzling parent.

Makemake's moon is estimated to be about how large across?

About 160 km, though some estimates run higher: roughly a ninth of Makemake's own width. Even the sharpest telescopes show the moon only as a dot, so its size has to be worked out from how much light it gives off.

In which constellation did Makemake lie when it was discovered in 2005?

Coma Berenices is a patch of sky with relatively few stars, so Makemake rarely passes in front of one. That is why astronomers prize each chance to watch it block a star's light.

About how long did Makemake block a star's light in 2011?

About 1 minute: the blackout was so brief that astronomers turned high-speed cameras on the star to time the moments it vanished and returned.

Where were the telescopes that watched Makemake pass in front of a star in April 2011?

South America: a chain of telescopes there, including three at ESO's observatories in Chile, caught the star blinking out. Timing the blackout from each site let astronomers measure Makemake's size.

Which planet's gravity would most proposed flyby missions use to sling a probe toward Makemake?

Jupiter, the heaviest planet, gives the biggest boost. Even with its help, studies put the flight to Makemake at roughly a decade at best, and often much longer.

Makemake is the second-brightest trans-Neptunian object in Earth's sky; which one outshines it?

Pluto is brighter, being both larger and closer to us. Mike Brown found Makemake hard to name because, apart from its brightness, he felt it had no obvious hook to tie to any myth.

Makemake's Unicode symbol, added in 2022, is a stylised version of what?

A petroglyph of the god's face, stylised to suggest the letter M. It was drawn by Denis Moskowitz, a software engineer who designed several dwarf-planet symbols, together with John T. Whelan.

Why did Makemake's discoverers rush their July 2005 announcement?

Rivals reported one of their finds: a Spanish team claimed a world the group had been quietly tracking, just after the group's online observing logs were opened from that team's institute. Within days the rest went public.

Mike Brown's software stamped Makemake with the codename K50331A; what did the digits record?

The date of the discovery images: 5 for 2005, then 0331 for March 31, with A for the first object he found. Brown wrote that the software assigned it the moment he clicked to confirm the find.

In legend, the god Makemake took the form of which creatures, seen as his incarnation?

Seabirds were his incarnation, and he was chief god of the birdman cult. Each year its champions raced to an offshore islet to bring back the season's first sooty tern egg.

Makemake's surface is dominated by frozen methane plus smaller amounts of which hydrocarbons?

Ethane, ethylene and acetylene are what sunlight and cosmic rays make as they break methane apart and the pieces recombine. Left long enough, the chain ends in dark, reddish gunk.

Which point of its orbit will Makemake reach in May 2033?

Aphelion, the far point of its orbit, about 52.8 times Earth's distance from the Sun. Astronomers today are seeing Makemake at very nearly its most remote.