![]() Still, formation through some kind of collision is most likely. All the most recent journal articles about Haumea admit that its formation – including the formation of its moons – is still unclear with no hypothesis matching all the data. Since our presentation last year, we have done a lot of work to try to understand how Hi’iaka could be rapidly rotating despite the fact that it is on a “normal” nearly circular orbit. (I recently received funding for an “archival” Hubble Space Telescope proposal that will investigate this in more detail.) Depending on the degree of misalignment (called the obliquity), changes to Hi’iaka’s spin-induced light curve are probably already detectable. ![]() We solidify our understanding of Hi’iaka’s 10-hour spin rate (compared to the 50-day orbital period) and then conjectured that Hi’iaka, like Pluto’s moons, has a spin axis misaligned with its orbit. Well, life and teaching and moving to new institutions happened, but Danielle and I are happy to report that the paper presenting our Hi’iaka results has been accepted and posted to arXiv.
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