Sentences with phrase «large planetary object»
This falloff is known as the «Kuiper cliff,» and its cause is unknown, though Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute has claimed that a large planetary object might be responsible.
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That's at least 100 times larger than the nanodiamonds that form when planetary objects collide, and it's far larger than diamonds that form by condensing from carbon vapor inside clouds of interplanetary gas and dust.
«We show that Imbrium was likely formed by an absolutely enormous object, large enough to be classified as a protoplanet,» said Pete Schultz, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University.
That once - rejected work has now inspired two teams of planetary scientists to model what might have happened if an object roughly 10 times as massive as Ceres, the largest asteroid, smashed into ancient Mars.
Haumea is a much larger object further out in the solar system, and together with the centaurs can help scientists learn more about planetary rings in general, writes Amanda A. Sickafoose, astronomer at MIT and the South African Astronomical Observatory, in a Nature commentary.
Now researchers claim that weirdly wobbling objects in the Kuiper Belt indicate the presence of yet another so - far - undiscovered planetary body at least as large as Mars.
Occasionally these objects look something like planetary nebulae, as in the case of the Crab Nebula, but they differ from the latter in three ways: (1) the total mass of their gas (they involve a larger mass, essentially all the mass of the exploding star), (2) their kinematics (they are expanding with higher velocities), and (3) their lifetimes (they last for a shorter time as visible nebulae).
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.
It is essentially a bottom - up process, wherein bits of dust build up into a larger, planetary object.
After reading up on the nebular hypothesis and figuring in the chaotic nature back then, I'm surprised that apparently no one has ever proposed that a planetary - sized object passed nearby a larger proto - Earth, causing a Moon - sized glob to get pulled off.