Sentences with phrase «smaller orbiting bodies»

Forming stars, planets, moons, or meteoroids by capturing18 smaller orbiting bodies is far more difficult than most people realize.19 However, if gases are inside these spheres, capture becomes more likely, and the more particles captured, the larger the sphere of influence becomes.

Not exact matches

Some of them, such as Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, additionally possess planetary rings — a collection of still smaller bodies of different sizes that also orbit a planet.

Most of the planets in the Solar System have smaller bodies, or satellites, that orbit a planet.

Some candidates can be checked further using another technique that looks for «wobbles» in the star caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting body, but Kepler 452 b is too distant and small for that.

Our own Kuiper Belt, which extends outward from Neptune's orbit, is home to many dwarf planets, comets, and other small bodies left over from the formation of the solar system.

For a few years, both were regarded as bona fide planets, but scientists soon discovered many more small bodies in similar orbits.

A concept called Comet Hitchhiker, developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, puts forth a new way to get into orbit and land on comets and asteroids, using the kinetic energy — the energy of motion — of these small bodies.

As improved telescope technology finds smaller and more distant asteroids, astronomers have identified clusters of similar - looking bodies clumped in analogous orbits.

[1] All objects that orbit the Sun, which are too small (not massive enough) for their own gravity to pull them into a nearly spherical shape are now defined by the IAU as being small solar system bodies.

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

The moon is a bonanza for scientists, Kring says, because it offers crucial insights for understanding the origins and evolution of Earth and other planets: how they formed from the accretion and differentiation of smaller bodies; how they were bombarded by impacts early in their histories; and even how some of them migrated in their orbits around the sun.

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 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.

Jupiter has two kinds of natural satellites: large spherical moons and smaller lumpy bodies that follow elongated orbits.

The frozen bodies populating the solar system's Kuiper Belt, a band of debris outside the orbit of Neptune, may be much smaller than astronomers thought.

Astronomers like Michael Brown of Caltech have been pushing current telescopes to the limit trying to locate new bodies in the Kuiper belt (a vast population of small bodies orbiting the sun past Neptune) and beyond.

All of those small bodies orbiting Pluto mean that it must have had a dynamic history.

Natural satellites are smaller celestial bodies that orbit around larger celestial bodies.

Other solar system bodies that are possibly dwarf planets include Sedna and Quaoar, small worlds far beyond Pluto's orbit, and 2012 VP113, an object that is thought to have one of the most distant orbits found beyond the known edge of our solar system.

A planet's gravity either attracts or pushes away the smaller bodies that would otherwise intersect its orbit; the gravity of a dwarf planet is not sufficient to make this happen.

A planet in an inclined orbit gravitationally attracts small bodies of rock and / or ice, called planetesimals, from the main disk, and moves them into an orbit aligned with that of the planet.

Measuring in at around half the size of Makemake, RR245 is much smaller than other known dwarf planets in the neighborhood, but still meets the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) criteria of that category: namely, it's in orbit around the Sun, it has sufficient mass for its self - gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and, unlike regular planets, it hasn't cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and it isn't a satellite.

It is commonly believed that the planets Uranus and Neptune migrated out to their present orbits after forming closer to the sun and then gravitationally interacted with smaller bodies.

The detected velocity variations were too small to be cause by a body orbiting star A, which is more massive (see HR 5544 on page 919).

To carry out the study, which is published as two articles in the journal «Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters», the researchers have analysed the effects of the so - called «Kozai mechanism», related to the gravitational perturbation that a large body exerts on the orbit of another much smaller and further away object.

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).

Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt (also referred to as the Edgeworth - Kuiper Belt), a disk of more than 70,000 small bodies larger than 100 km in diameter made of rock and ices, and orbiting the Sun.

In space, these points orbit the more massive body at the same speed as the smaller body.

«The particularly long lifetime of 2015BZ509 on its retrograde orbit, in the same region of space as the largest planet in the Solar System, makes it arguably the most intriguing small body in this region.