Atlas · Makemake
The moon of Makemake
Makemake has one known moon, found in Hubble pictures taken in 2015. It is about 1,300 times fainter than Makemake and has no name yet, only the label S/2015 (136472) 1.
Makemake and its moon
Makemake and the orbit of its moon, to scale. The orbit’s direction in space is not known.
The edge of the drawing is 28,000 km from the centre of Makemake.
How to read it
Nobody knows yet which way this orbit faces in space, so it is drawn flat on the page, as if seen from straight above. Its size and shape are right. Its direction is not shown. Makemake is drawn to scale with the orbits. The moons are not: at this scale most would be far too small to see, so each is a dot.
- Solid dot. A spacecraft has mapped the whole surface.
- Half dot. A spacecraft has seen part of it.
- Ring. Never seen as more than a point of light.
- Pale line. Goes round the usual way, the way the planets go round the Sun: anticlockwise on these drawings.
- Broken line. For 1 moon we have no run of positions to fit an orbit to, so it has a line and no dot.
Nobody has measured its size. Touch a row to pick out its orbit.
The moon
1 moon
A first orbit was worked out in 2025 from twelve Hubble sightings: a circle about 22,250 km in radius, give or take 780 km, taking 18 days. It has not yet been published in a journal. From Earth the orbit is seen almost edge-on.
| Moon | Orbit size | One orbit | Tilt | Width | Found | See it in 3D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S/2015 (136472) 1. Seen only as a point of light.no positions to place it by yet | 22,300 km | 18.02 days | not known | not measured | 2016 |
Where this comes from
- Bamberger 2025, arXiv:2509.05880 (a first orbit; not yet in a journal)
- Ortiz et al. 2012, Nature 491, 566 (stellar occultation)
- Parker et al. 2016, Astrophysical Journal Letters 825, L9 (the discovery)
- NASA/JPL Small-Body Database
Orbit size is the average distance from the centre of Makemake. Tilt is measured from the plane of the planets, and above 90° means the moon goes round backwards compared with the planets.