Tarqeq

Imagine a tiny, icy ball spinning around the Sun way, way out past the big planets. That's Tarqeq! It's not a planet, but a dwarf planet, which means it's smaller than the big guys like Earth. It's so far away that the Sun looks like just a bright star! Tarqeq is covered in ice and rock, making it a very cold and dark place. It's like a lonely snowball in the cosmic backyard.

Even though Tarqeq is super far from the Sun, it still spins around! It takes a very, very long time to go all the way around the Sun – about 157 Earth years! That's longer than your great-great-great-grandparents have been alive! Tarqeq also spins on its own axis, and one day on Tarqeq is about 30 Earth hours long. So, a Tarqeq day is a little longer than our day.

Tarqeq is mostly made of ice and rock. Think of it like a giant, frozen snowball mixed with some dirt. Because it's so far from the Sun, it's incredibly cold there. The temperature is about -230 degrees Celsius (-382 degrees Fahrenheit)! That's colder than the coldest winter day you can imagine, even colder than the inside of your freezer!

Scientists are always looking for new things in space. Tarqeq was found in 2004 by a team of astronomers using a big telescope. They were looking in a part of space called the Kuiper Belt, which is like a giant donut of icy objects way out past Neptune. Finding Tarqeq helped us learn more about the strange and wonderful things that exist in our solar system.