Sentences with phrase «icy bodies»

"Icy bodies" refers to objects in space, such as comets or moons, that are made mostly of ice or contain a significant amount of it. Full definition
The researchers believe the planet's gravity then pulled small rocky or icy bodies out of the main disc and into the plane of its orbit.
That's most likely because they are fragments of a larger icy body, say a planet, that recently broke up, the researchers suggest.
If the early results hold up, this time it's the dwarf planet Eris's turn to be demoted, and Pluto might have just regained its status as the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune.
Poor Pluto is crowded by thousands of other icy bodies in the outer solar system, some bigger than Pluto itself, so it fails the test.
It envisions the great reshuffling as a brief, violent affair that not only put the outer planets where they are today but also created the Kuiper belt of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, gave the planets scores of oddly orbiting moons, and bombarded the solar system with a rain of asteroids and comets so fierce that it would have cooked all but the deepest subterranean life on early Earth.
Each proposed scenario creates a population of icy bodies beyond the Kuiper belt and leaves a distinctive imprint on the orbits of these distant objects that would be still be observable today.
Farrell says the work will be useful for missions to other icy bodies too: «We don't want future geologists to look at their radar data and say no reflectance means no aquifer.»
This large debris disk is similar to the Kuiper Belt, which encircles the solar system and contains a range of icy bodies from dust grains to objects the size of dwarf planets, such as Pluto.
«We know that these radioactive elements exist within icy bodies, but this is the first systematic look across the solar system to estimate radiolysis.
In the past, I have searched for the largest bodies in the Kuiper belt in the southern skies and searched for distant icy bodies like Sedna in the Solar System and what they could tell us about the birth environment of our Solar System.
The discovery of Sedna on a highly eccentric orbit beyond Neptune suggests a perplexing new population of icy bodies residing far outside the Kuiper Belt.
«Pluto, Eris and Makemake are among the larger examples of the numerous icy bodies orbiting far away from our Sun,» says Jose Luis Ortiz.
With 8 -10-meter class telescopes coming online equipped now in the next decade with large fields - of - view (such as the Subaru Telescope with Hyper Suprime - Cam and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), I think we'll be able to find many more residents of the inner Oort Cloud, and begin to really study this population of remote icy bodies that until now has remained rather elusive.
On Tuesday 31 May Jesper Lindkvist of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna and the Department of Physics at Umeå University will defend his PhD thesis entitled Plasma Interactions with Icy Bodies in the Solar System.
The Oort Cloud is too distant to be seen by current telescopes, but is thought to be a spherical distribution of small icy bodies at the outermost edge of the solar system.
«As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system, then complex organic molecules are also, very probably, widespread.»
If the results hold up, he says, they could increase «the relative role of cryovolcanism in resurfacing icy bodies
When the ice giant spiraled outward, it carried nearby smaller icy bodies along with it, shepherding them toward the edge of the solar system.
In fact, those that travel inward from the Oort Cloud — a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 300 billion kilometers away from the sun — can have periods of thousands or even millions of years.
On 14 July, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will swoop past Pluto, the gatekeeper to a region of thousands of icy bodies known as the Kuiper belt.
«Understanding their origin and how icy bodies evolve is one more piece of the puzzle we need to lay in order to explain the origin of our Solar System and its eventual fate,» says Jesper Lindkvist.
Dwarf planets like Pluto and smaller icy bodies populate the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune.
After a decade - long journey by the New Horizons spacecraft through our solar system, we can finally add Pluto and its main moon Charon to the roster of large icy bodies whose landscapes we have seen.
The Kuiper Belt lies just beyond Neptune, and contains thousands of small icy bodies left over from the formation of the solar system more than four billion years ago.
Six known objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies stretching from Neptune outward toward interstellar space, all have elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction.
The Oort cloud is a spherical distribution of cold, icy bodies lying at the limits of the Sun's gravitational pull.
The second impactor was 50 - to 60 - kilometer - wide (31 - to 37 - mile - wide), and it scooped out the younger crater, Rheasilvia, which is nearly 500 kilometers wide and 19 kilometers deep and is similar other large basins found on low - gravity icy bodies.
Although 220 km (137 miles) in diameter, the largest outer moon, Phoebe, is dark with a retrograde, highly inclined orbit and so may be a captured icy body from the Edgeworth - Kuiper Belt rather than a moon that formed with the giant planet.
There are small rocky lumps close to the sun and larger, icier bodies in the cold outer recesses.
But much farther away, in regions long presumed to be the realm of comets and other icy bodies, there could be billions of rocky orbs circling the sun, a new study suggests.
In January, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists at the California Institute of Technology, speculated on the existence of a ninth planet based on an odd alignment of six distant icy bodies.
The most commonly accepted idea about the origin of the oceans is that the water came from icy bodies out near Jupiter; the planet sent those bodies to collide with Earth.
Yet some remote icy bodies are dropping clues that a giant orb may be lurking on the fringes of the solar system.Six hunks of ice in the debris field beyond Neptune travel on orbits that are aligned with one another.
The other two gaps are 100 AU and 160 AU from the central star, well beyond the extent of our solar system's Kuiper Belt, the region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The Kuiper Belt consists of a numerous collection of small icy bodies that mostly orbit beyond the planets, but in the same plane as them.
In particular, I will focus on planets on eccentric orbits, not only because typical exoplanetary systems have been found to contain these, but also because their interactions with debris disks theoretically facilitates the transport of icy bodies within the habitable zone of planetary systems.
They applied the model to the icy bodies around our solar system to show how radiation emitted from rocky cores could break up water molecules and support hydrogen - eating microbes.
These icy bodies apparently survived the star's evolution as it became a bloated red giant and then collapsed to a small, dense white dwarf.
The new findings are observational evidence supporting the idea that icy bodies are also present in other planetary systems, and have survived throughout the history of the star's evolution.
In the icy bodies around our solar system, radiation emitted from rocky cores could break up water molecules and support hydrogen - eating microbes.
The other suggests they arose in a two - stage process called core accretion, in which bits of material smashed and fused together to form bigger rocky, icy bodies.
Nimmo's models suggest Pluto's ocean is about 100 kilometers deep and billions of years old, kept liquid by large amounts of ammonia, a natural antifreeze prevalent in icy bodies of the outer solar system.
They nicknamed those icy bodies Quaoar, Sedna, Santa, Easter Bunny, and Xena.
Since January, scientists have been chasing Planet Nine: a distant hypothetical world that could have 10 times the mass of Earth and explain the peculiarly clustered orbits of six icy bodies beyond Neptune.
Crystalline silicates, with individual atoms neatly arranged in lattices, are expected to form at high temperatures close to the star, but they also show up in comets — icy bodies that formed in the cool, outer parts of our solar system.
Some of these icy bodies are «truly exotic,» says astronomer Thomas Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
They came up with a surprisingly high value (for an icy body): over 4 grams per cubic centimeter.

Phrases with «icy bodies»

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z