Sentences with phrase «icy bodies beyond»

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not exact matches

With a diameter of about 1,215 km, the France - sized moon is one of largest known objects in the Kuiper Belt, the region of icy, rocky bodies beyond Neptune.

Dwarf planets like Pluto and smaller icy bodies populate the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune.

New Horizons also could potentially take a close - up look at a smaller, more ancient object much farther out in the Kuiper Belt: the disk - shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune believed to contain comets, asteroids and other small, icy bodies.

It's been a busy time for NASA: Just before the first rover landed on Mars (page 10), the Stardust spacecraft achieved a dazzling double score, collecting pieces of comet Wild 2 (the first sample of a body beyond the moon) and sending back pictures of the comet's 3.1 - mile - wide icy core.

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.

At roughly a fifth the mass of the moon, it is the largest of the icy bodies that make up the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune's orbit.

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.

A population of icy bodies residing beyond the Kuiper belt is formed in each model.

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.

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.

Unlike Ceres, which orbits just around or beyond the Solar System's ice line, Vesta's surface is not icy, like Ceres, Vesta appears to be an evolved body.