Makemake has a moon

Makemake is a dwarf planet with a diameter roughly two thirds of Pluto's. Makemake is orbiting with an aphelion of 52.8 AU and a perihelion of 38.6 AU. It was discovered on March 31, 2005 by a team led by Michael E. Brown at Caltech.

Hubble Space Telescope data has been reviewed and what astronomer's believe is a moon orbiting Makemake has been identified.

Here is an article detailing the find:

Astronomers Find a Moon Hiding Around Makemake in Hubble Data

In 2005, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo discovered dwarf planet Makemake, currently believed to be the third largest object in the Kuiper Belt after Pluto and Eris. But at the time, astronomers believed it was alone out there on its long path around the Sun. But new data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a moon around the tiny world, and offer a little explanation as to where it was hiding. "The satellite that we found was not that faint and not that close to Makemake," says Alex Parker, principal investigator of the research and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "It popped right out of the data when we looked."

It turns out it was always there. But the newly found object, provisionally called MK 2, orbits Makemake nearly edge-on from our point of view, meaning most of the time it's obscured by the comparatively bright dwarf planet. Makemake is 886 miles (1,434 km) in diameter, while the new object appears to be only 100 miles (161 Km). Current scenarios also paint it as a dark companion compared to bright Makemake. The dark surface of MK 2, which in one scenario may reflect as little as 4 percent of light, could explain why astronomers previously showed Makemake to have two highly contrasting albedos (reflectivities) that indicated different materials at work. Those dark spots didn't seem to line up with the 7.7-hour day on Makemake, though. "You would expect Makemake's brightness would go up and down as it rotated, but it's brightness hardly goes up or down," Parker says.There are two possibilities for why a bright dwarf planet has such a dark moon. In one scenario, it's a captured Kuiper Belt Object that through various circumstances ended up in orbit around Makemake. In the other, a collision formed it, much like the one that formed Pluto's moon system.

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