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Hiʻiaka (moon)

Adapted from Wikipedia · Explorer experience

A colorful montage showing the planet Jupiter and its four largest moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — taken by the NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Hiʻiaka, a Moon of Haumea

Hiʻiaka is a special moon that travels around a tiny planet called Haumea. Haumea is a dwarf planet that spins very fast in space. Hiʻiaka is named after a goddess from Hawaiian mythology, who is the patron of the Big Island of Hawaii and loves hula.

Hiʻiaka was discovered in 2005 by Michael E. Brown and his team using special cameras at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. This moon takes about 49.5 days to go around Haumea. It is not a perfect circle and measures about 370 kilometers across.

People think Hiʻiaka is made mostly of water ice mixed with rock. This makes it very light for its size. Its surface shines brightly because it is covered in shiny water ice. Hiʻiaka spins around once every 9.68 hours as it travels through space.

Together with another moon named Namaka, Hiʻiaka is thought to have broken away from Haumea a very long time ago. Scientists believe these moons formed when Haumea spun so fast that pieces flew off into space.

Images

A colorful view of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon, taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby in 2015.
A photograph of asteroid 243 Ida and its moon Dactyl taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1993, showing details of the asteroid's surface and its tiny moon.
An image of the dwarf planet Haumea and its satellites taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Related articles

Haumea
Dwarf planet
Hula
Michael E. Brown

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Hiʻiaka (moon), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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