Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 08 2019, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-rocks-only dept.

The Solar System's Kuiper belt, a donut-shaped pile up of debris extending beyond Neptune, contains a surprisingly lack of small objects, judging from images of Pluto and its moon Charon.

The pics were taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which blasted off from Earth in 2006, and made it out to the edges of the Solar System in 2015 to snap closeups of the dwarf planet and its moon. These photos revealed craters where objects in the surrounding Kuiper belt have smashed into the larger bodies.

A team of researchers led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a non-profit based in Texas, took a look at the photos of the dents, and now believe the craters on Pluto and Charon show that small Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are rare.

How do they know? Well, the impact craters range from 300 metres to 40 kilometres across, and there are few at the low end, suggesting there are or were not that many small KBOs whirling around the belt to crash into Pluto and its moon.

That means, unlike belts of cosmic rocks elsewhere in the Solar System that have a mix of object sizes, the Kuiper belt is where only the big hunks of rubble play.

“This surprising lack of small KBOs changes our view of the Kuiper Belt and shows that either its formation or evolution, or both, were somewhat different than those of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,” said Kelsi Singer, first author of a paper published today in Science describing the discovery, and a senior research scientist at SwRI.

“Perhaps the asteroid belt has more small bodies than the Kuiper Belt because its population experiences more collisions that break up larger objects into smaller ones.”


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Snow on Friday March 08 2019, @03:53PM

    by Snow (1601) on Friday March 08 2019, @03:53PM (#811562) Journal

    But where did the large objects come from? Big things blowing up make big and small objects, and if they grew from cosmic dust, wouldn't you expect all sorts of sizes?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2