10th Planet, or Planetoid, discovered

Quaoar, or 2002 LM60 Quaoar, or it's scientific identifier, "2002 LM60", was discovered by Michael Brown and Chadwick Truillo of the California Institute of Technology while they were surveying the Kuiper Belt, a field of comet-like bodies stretching 7 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit, using a 1.2-meter telescope. It is about one half of Pluto's size, traversing a circular solar orbit over a period of 288 years nearly four billion miles away from Earth.

Brown and Truillo chose the name Quaoar from creation mythology of the Native American Tongva tribe, early inhabitants of the Los Angeles area.

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