Astronomers have described a dwarf planet orbiting in the far, frozen reaches of the Solar System and unveiled a geological map of Ganymede, an icy satellite of Jupiter. Space Observers led by Pedro Lacerda of Queen's University, Belfast, used a giant infra-red telescope atop a mountain in Hawaii to get unprecedented views of a frozen mini-world called Haumea, first spotted in 2005. Known as a dwarf planet, Haumea distantly orbits the Sun in a region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.<br/><br/>It is the fourth largest-known object in the belt, after Eris, Pluto and Makemake. Haumea spins at an extraordinarily fast rate, apparently the result of a massive impact with another space object more than a billion years, Lacerda said in a press release yesterday. A day there lasts just 3.9 hours, driven by a spin<br/><br/>so ferocious that the planetoid has been deformed into the shape of an elongated diamond, 2,000 kilometres by 1,600 kms by 1,000 kms.