Sentences with phrase «big planetary objects»

Not exact matches

Now, planetary scientists have conducted the first computer simulations that bolster a controversial alternative idea: The satellites formed as our own moon did, after a big object smashed into the planet and kicked up debris.

Planetary scientists have expected that ongoing searches would turn up even bigger objects, but it wasn't clear whether the surveys could extend far beyond the Kuiper belt.

«Usually when you think of two objects colliding, one of them leaves a big hole,» says Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-authored the new study with Martin Jutzi of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Both objects formed among the rocky and icy protoplanets beyond the Solar System's «ice line» now located around 2.7 AUs, but the early development of Jupiter apparently prevented such large protoplanets between the gas giant and planet Mars from agglomerating into even bigger planetary bodies, by sweeping many into pulverizing collisions as well as slinging them into the Sun or Oort Cloud, or even beyond Sol's gravitational reach altogether.