Haumea family

[citation needed] The objects' common physical characteristics include neutral colours and deep infrared absorption features (at 1.5 and 2.0 μm) typical of water ice.

In today's sparsely populated Kuiper belt, the chance of such a collision occurring over the age of the Solar System is less than 0.1 percent.

Therefore, it appears likely that the dynamic scattered disc region, in which the possibility of such a collision is far higher, is the place of origin for the object which would become Haumea and its kin.

[2] Because it would have taken at least a billion years for the group to have diffused as far as it has, the collision that created the Haumea family is thought to have occurred very early in the Solar System's history.

[13] This conflicts with the findings of Rabinowitz and colleagues who found in their studies of the group that their surfaces were remarkably bright; their colour suggests that they have recently (i.e. within the last 100 million years) been resurfaced by fresh ice.

Over a timescale as long as a billion years, energy from the Sun would have reddened and darkened their surfaces, and no plausible explanation has been found to account for their apparent youth.

[14] However, more detailed studies of the visible and near infrared spectrum of Haumea[15] show it is a homogeneous surface covered by an intimate 1:1 mixture of amorphous and crystalline ice, together with no more than 8% organics.