Sentences with phrase «small icy bodies»

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.

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 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.

When the ice giant spiraled outward, it carried nearby smaller icy bodies along with it, shepherding them toward the edge of the solar system.

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

Not exact matches

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 icy small bodies warm up as they approach the Sun, and the ice sublimes to form a coma [a dense cloud of gas and dust particles around a nucleus] and often a tail, making the comets observable,» she explained.

There are small rocky lumps close to the sun and larger, icier bodies in the cold outer recesses.

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.

According to Stern, this problem would vanish if the icy bodies were actually much brighter — reflecting at least 15 % of incident sunlight instead of the generally assumed 4 % — and, consequently, much smaller.

(4) Does the «typical» circumstellar disk states of primary star + Kuiper Belt Star show evidence for material from each of the different kinds of small outer solar system bodies (Comets, Centaurs, KBOs) like the active comet debris in HR4796A and the icy KBO debris in Fomalhaut and HD 32297?

Traditionally, the solar system has been divided into planets (the big bodies orbiting the Sun), their satellites (a.k.a. moons, variously sized objects orbiting the planets), asteroids (small dense objects orbiting the Sun) and comets (small icy objects with highly eccentric orbits).