How far away is Quaoar?
Quaoar is at about 42 AU away from us, more distant than Pluto and Neptune, which are both at about 30 AU. 1 AU is an “Astronomical Unit” and is equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, about 150 million kilometers. So Quaoar is about 6 billion kilometers from us. At walking speed, it would take you about 100,000 years to get there. Going at the speed the Space Shuttle orbits the earth, it would take 25 years to get there. It takes light 5 hours to get there from the sun. Quaoar is in a nearly circular orbit. Its eccentricity (a measure of the ellipticity of a circle) is less than 0.04, meaning that its distance from the sun only changes by about 8% over the course of a Quaoar year (which is 285 Earth years). This is very different from Pluto, which has an eccentricity about 6 times larger. You can see its orbit below. Because this object is so bright, within a month of discovery we were able to trace Quaoar’s position back two decades in survey data. Quaoar’s orbit is also
