15760 Albion, provisional designation , was the first

trans-Neptunian object A trans-Neptunian object (TNO), also written transneptunian object, is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune, which has a semi-major axis of 30.1 astronomical units (au). Typically ...

to be discovered after

Pluto Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest ...

and Charon. Measuring about 108–167 kilometres in diameter, it was discovered in 1992 by

David C. Jewitt David Clifford Jewitt (born 1958) is a British-American astronomer who studies the Solar System, especially its minor bodies. He is based at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Member of the Institute for Geophysics and Pl ...

and

Jane X. Luu Jane X. Luu ( vi, ; born July 1963) is a Vietnamese-American astronomer and defense systems engineer. She was awarded the Kavli Prize (shared with David C. Jewitt and Michael Brown) for 2012 "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt ...

at the

Mauna Kea Observatory The Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) are a group of independent astronomical research facilities and large telescope observatories that are located at the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, United States. The facilities are locate ...

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

. After the discovery, they dubbed the object "Smiley" and it was shortly hailed as the tenth planet by the press. It is a "cold"

classical Kuiper belt object A classical Kuiper belt object, also called a cubewano ( "QB1-o"), is a low-eccentricity Kuiper belt object (KBO) that orbits beyond Neptune and is not controlled by an orbital resonance with Neptune. Cubewanos have orbits with semi-major a ...

and gave rise to the name ''cubewano'' for this kind of object, after the portion of its designation. Decoding its provisional designation, "QB₁" reveals that it was the 27th object found in the second half of August of that year. As of January 2018, around 2,400 further objects have been found beyond Neptune, a majority of which are classical Kuiper belt objects. It was named after Albion from

William Blake's mythology The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain an invented mythology, in which Blake worked to encode his spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of ...

Naming

This

minor planet According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a minor planet is an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet. Before 2006, the IAU officially used the term ''mino ...

was named after Albion from the complex mythology of English poet and painter

William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...

(1757–1827). Albion is the island-dwelling primeval man whose division resulted into ''

The Four Zoas ''Vala, or The Four Zoas'' is one of the uncompleted prophetic books by the English poet William Blake, begun in 1797. The eponymous main characters of the book are the Four Zoas (Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas), who were created by the fall ...

'': Urizen, Tharmas, Luvah/Orc and Urthona/Los. The name Albion itself derives from the ancient and mythological name of Britain. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 31 January 2018 (). The discoverers suggested the name "Smiley" for ,What Lurks in the Outer Solar System?
(Science@NASA, 13 September 2001) but the name was already used for an asteroid 1613 Smiley, named after the American astronomer Charles Hugh Smiley. It has received the number 15760 and remained unnamed until January 2018 (it was normally referred to simply as "QB1", even though this was technically ambiguous without the year of discovery).

Legacy

The next year in 1993, objects in similar orbits were found including (15788) 1993 SB,

(15789) 1993 SC (15789) 1993 SC is a trans-Neptunian object of the plutino class. The discovery was made in 1993 at the La Palma Observatory with the Isaac Newton Telescope. It was the second plutino to receive an MPC number. KBO's found in 1993 include: (15788) ...

(181708) 1993 FW (181708) 1993 FW was the second trans-Neptunian object to be discovered after Pluto and Charon, the first having been 15760 Albion, formerly known as . It was discovered in 1993 by David C. Jewitt and Jane X. Luu at the Mauna Kea Observatory, Haw ...

, and (385185) 1993 RO. Over one thousand bodies were found in the Kuiper belt orbiting between about 30 and 50 AU from the Sun in the twenty years after finding 15760 Albion. This revealed a vast belt of bodies, more than just Pluto and Albion themselves. By 2018, over 2000 Kuiper belt objects were discovered.

Notes

Minor planet and asteroid provisional designations follow a format, in which the year it was discovered comes first, followed by the half-month it was discovered alphabetically (e.g. A=January 1–15, B=January 16–31 and so on, but skipping the letters I and Z) and then the order of its discovery alphabetically followed by a number (e.g. 1992 QA, 1992 QB, 1992 QC ... 1992 QY, 1992 QZ, 1992 QA1, 1992 QB1 and so on.) According to this, Q=August 16–31 and B1=25+2=27.

References

External links

Beyond Jupiter: 15760 Albion
Nikolai Wünsche, ''Journal for Occultation Astronomy'', October 2019

David Jewitt, ''Astronomy Beat'', 3 May 2010
New Planet Found in the Outer Solar System
European Southern Observatory, 2 October 1992
1992 QB1 - First Object Discovered in Kuiper Belt
David Jewitt, 14 September 1992 * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Albion 015760 Discoveries by David C. Jewitt Discoveries by Jane Luu Named minor planets 19920830

Naming

Legacy

See also

Notes

References

External links