Centaurs tagged posts

An artist’s concept of a trans-Neptunian object(TNOs). The distant sun is reduced to a bright star at a distance of over 3 billion miles. Credit: NASA

The mysterious Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs) lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. For years, astronomers have been discovering bodies and minor planets in this region which are influenced by Neptune’s gravity, and orbit our sun at an average distance of 30 Astronomical Units. In recent years, several new TNOs have been discovered that have caused us to rethink what constitutes a planet, not to mention the history of the solar system.

The most recent of these mystery objects is called “Niku”, a small chunk of ice that takes its name for the Chinese word for “rebellious”...

Because they are so distant from the Earth, Centaurs appear as pinpricks of light in even the largest telescopes. Saturn’s 200-km moon Phoebe, depicted in this image, seems likely to be a Centaur that was captured by that planet’s gravity at some time in the past. Until spacecraft are sent to visit other Centaurs, our best idea of what they look like comes from images like this one, obtained by the Cassini space probe orbiting Saturn. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, having flown past Pluto six months ago, has been targeted to conduct an approach to a 45-km wide trans-Neptunian object at the end of 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last 2 decades means that these objects pose a much great...