Kuiper Belt tagged posts

Webb Telescope Detects Unusual Gas Jets from Centaur 29P

Centaur 29P Outgassing (Artist’s Concept)

Inspired by the half-human, half-horse creatures that are part of Ancient Greek mythology, the field of astronomy has its own kind of centaurs: distant objects orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has mapped the gases spewing from one of these objects, suggesting a varied composition and providing new insights into the formation and evolution of the solar system.

Centaurs are former trans-Neptunian objects that have been moved inside Neptune’s orbit by subtle gravitational influences of the planets in the last few million years, and may eventually become short-period comets...

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Mystery Orbits in Outermost reaches of Solar System not caused by ‘Planet Nine’

This is an artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object, located on the outer rim of our solar system.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth planet, can instead be explained by the combined gravitational force of small objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, say researchers.

The alternative explanation to the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis, put forward by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the American University of Beirut, proposes a disc made up of small icy bodies with a combined mass as much as ten times that of Earth...

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NASA’s New Horizons Mission reveals entirely new kind of world

three views of the object showing how color data was overlaid on a higher resolution view to create the color view
The first color image of Ultima Thule, taken at a distance of 85,000 miles (137,000 kilometers) at 4:08 Universal Time on January 1, 2019, highlights its reddish surface. At left is an enhanced color image taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), produced by combining the near infrared, red and blue channels. The center image taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has a higher spatial resolution than MVIC by approximately a factor of five. At right, the color has been overlaid onto the LORRI image to show the color uniformity of the Ultima and Thule lobes. Note the reduced red coloring at the neck of the object.
Source: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Published: January 2, 2019
Historical Date: January 1,...
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Moon Orbits 3rd Largest Dwarf Planet in our Solar System

Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. These two images, taken a year apart, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, shows the companion in a different orbital position around its parent body. 2007 OR10 is the third-largest known dwarf planet, behind Pluto and Eris, and the largest unnamed world in the solar system. The pair is located in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from the solar system's formation. Credits: NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI)

Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. These two images, taken a year apart, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, shows the companion in a different orbital position around its parent body. 2007 OR10 is the third-largest known dwarf planet, behind Pluto and Eris, and the largest unnamed world in the solar system. The pair is located in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from the solar system’s formation. Credits: NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI)

The combined power of 3 space observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has helped astronomers uncover a moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, catalogued as 2007 OR10...

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