Sentences with phrase «belt objects formed»
Rather than growing incrementally from small precursors, as has been conventionally believed, he argues the largest Kuiper belt objects formed in a series of collisions between objects of roughly equal size — a process Brown describes as «pyramidal growth.»
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ Not exact matches
Another possibility is that objects in the Kuiper belt formed in place and were on their way to becoming full - size planets but stopped growing for some unknown reason.
New Horizons will also help astronomers learn how objects in the Kuiper belt formed and interacted with the planets.
Gomes's model implies that the other Kuiper belt objects might also have formed far closer in than they are now.
These two drifts across the solar system meant Jupiter crashed through the asteroid belt twice, mixing asteroids that had formed either side of its original orbit and leaving behind the well - mixed objects we see today.
Every Kuiper belt object and Oort cloud entity is a geologic fossil, preserved at low temperatures, largely unaltered by time, and made up of the material from which the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.
That's because one way Kuiper belt objects might have formed in situ, Parker says, is under an emerging model of planet formation in which turbulences and vortexes in the protoplanetary nebula allow many tiny particles to coalesce extremely rapidly into big ones.
Every Kuiper belt object and Oort cloud entity is a geologic fossil, preserved at low temperatures, largely unaltered by time, and made up of the material from which the solar system formed.
Because the blown - away material is primarily ice, this means that some large Kuiper belt objects could have been built from a small number of really big collisions among increasingly ice - depleted bodies, while others might have been formed from smaller, less powerful collisions that allowed more ice to remain.
The belt contains essential information about the planetary formation processes, including both the «cold disk» that harbors the objects that are thought to formed in situ with the whole planetary system, and the «hot / scattered disk» that is the refuge of objects that are dynamically scattered into it during the dynamical evolution of the inner solar system.
«If there is water in Kuiper belt - like objects around other stars, as there now appears to be, then when rocky planets form they need not contain life's ingredients,» said Siyi Xu, the study's lead author, a postdoctoral scholar at the European Southern Observatory in Germany who earned her doctorate at UCLA.
Recent images show numerous craters and unusual bright spots that scientists believe tell how Ceres, the first object discovered in our solar system's asteroid belt, formed and whether its surface is changing.