A number of ESO’s telescopes at La Silla and Paranal, Chile, were used to observe the dwarf planet Makemake. Mainly, these are the Very Large Telescope (VLT), New Technology Telescope (NTT) and TRAPPIST (transiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescopes. The data obtained with other smaller telescopes in South America such as the one in Cerro Armazones, the place where the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be built, were combined with the main ones to obtain the maximum amount of information.
Makemake was discovered on March 31, 2005 by a team of astronomers at Palomar Observatory. This discovery was announced along with another dwarf planet, Eris. Initially, it was called FY9 2005 and later it was officially given the name of the creator of humanity and god of fertility of Easter Island remembering that its discovery had taken place two days after Easter.
Makemake has an orbit highly inclined from the ecliptic and close to another dwarf planet, Haumea. It’s farther from the Sun than Pluto but closer than Eris and its orbital period is 310 years. It doesn’t appear to have any satellites.
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A great opportunity to study the dwarf planet Makemake was its passing in front of the star NOMAD 1181-0235723 on April 23, 2011. The event, called stellar occultation, only lasted about a minute so the astronomers used a high speed camera called ULTRACAM that can shoot up to 500 pictures per second and an infrared instrument called ISAAC to obtain a significant amount of images.
It was therefore possible to observe Makemake like never before and the prolonged analysis of the data obtained has allowed the scientists to get a better idea of its features. Its shape is that of a flattened sphere with axes of about 1430 (about 888 miles) and 1502 km (about 933 miles) in diameter, about two-thirds of those of Pluto and Eris. The greatest question mark concerned the possibility that it had an atmosphere and these observations suggest that it has none.
Pluto has a thin atmosphere, instead Eris, which in many ways is the similar to it, doesn’t have one, probably because it’s too far from the Sun. When Makemake passed in front of the star NOMAD 1181-0235723 its light disappeared then reappeared sharply. The presence of an atmosphere would make these transition softer. However, it’s possible that there are areas where sunlight, though dim, creates a temporary presence of an atmosphere.
Those aren’t shocking discoveries but at a time when continuing reports of findings on planets sometimes hundreds of light years away arrive it may be curious to find out something new on a planet, although a dwarf one, in the solar system.
