Well it looks like there will be no Santa this Christmas. Children will still get their gifts, but the Kuiper Belt Object that up to now has been called Santa has just received a permanent name.
The object is 2003 EL61, discovered in 2005 along with Eris and Makemake, which was officially named a few months ago. It took nearly three years to name Santa, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) finally did so on 2008 September 22 or so. They named it Haumea, a Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and of stone. I had heard it was going to be named after a Hawaiian creation god. So I figured it was going to be named Kane, a Hawaiian god of creation. Childbirth can be thought of as a creation, so "Haumea" still fits the pattern. Haumea has two satellites, and I thought they were going to be named Hi'iaka and Pele.
The object is weirdly shaped, like an American football with rounded corners, because of its rapid rotational spin of 4 hours. It has two small satellites, which were named Hi'iaka and Namaka, so I got one of them right. Haumea is 50 astronomical units (AU) away, and gets as close as 35 AU at times. It takes 285 years to revolve around the Sun. It is thought to consist mostly of rock, with a thick ice crust.
The IAU also said that it was a plutoid. I do not like the concept of plutoid, because the name is biased to one particular instance of the concept. Similar terminologies would call globular clusters such as M13, M92, and Omega Centauri galaxioids, and stars such as Vega and Arcturus sunoids. Further, it is inconsistent. Ceres is a plutoid, but Orcus is not; it is almost as large, and neither are Sedna, Quaoar, Ixion, or Varuna. In my opinion all of these should be called plutoids if Ceres is one. But I think the whole concept should be dropped altogether.
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