15760 Albion
Albion (1992 QB1) is a small, reddish body in the classical Kuiper belt, moving on a near-circular orbit about 44 AU from the Sun. Its 1992 discovery was the first sign of the belt of icy worlds that Pluto belongs to. No spacecraft has visited it and it has never been resolved; its size is estimated from its brightness, and its mass and rotation are unknown.
Key facts
Science
Physical
- Mean radius
- 77 km · 1% of Earth's radius
Orbital
- Semi-major axis
- 44.1 AU
- Eccentricity
- 0.07116
- Inclination
- 2.19 °
- Orbital period
- 293.18 years
- Perihelion
- 41 AU
- Aphelion
- 47.3 AU
- Mean orbital velocity
- 4.48 km/s
Discovery
- Discovered
- August 30, 1992
- Discoverer
- David Jewitt and Jane Luu
Composition
- Make-up
- A dark, red surface typical of cold classical Kuiper belt objects, thought to be irradiated ices and tholins (sunlight-processed organics) — but Albion is too faint for a resolved spectrum, so its make-up is inferred from its colour, not measured. The interior is entirely unconstrained; no spacecraft has visited.
Radiation & temperature
- Insolation
- 0.000513 S⊕ · 1/1,948 of the sunlight Earth receives
- Geometric albedo
- 0.10
- Equilibrium temperature
- 41 K (-232 °C)
Discovery & history
- Discovered
- August 30, 1992
- By
- David Jewitt and Jane Luu
- Method
- Photographic plates
- Name
- Named in 2018 — the discoverers' first choice, 'Smiley', was already an asteroid name — after Albion, the primeval man in the mythology of the poet-painter William Blake.
Discovered on 30 August 1992 by David Jewitt and Jane Luu with the University of Hawaii's 2.24 m telescope on Mauna Kea, after a years-long CCD survey for objects beyond Neptune. Creeping across the sky as a faint 23rd-magnitude point, it was the first trans-Neptunian object found after Pluto (1930) and its moon Charon (1978) — the first hard evidence of the belt of icy worlds that Pluto belongs to. Its provisional designation, 1992 QB1, gave the whole class of classical Kuiper belt objects their nickname, 'cubewanos'. Numbered 15760, it went unnamed for 26 years before being called Albion in 2018.
Images
Albion has only ever been imaged as a faint moving point of light. No spacecraft has visited it and no telescope has resolved its disk, so no true picture of it exists.