The Kuiper belt is believed to have formed shortly after the planets in the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. The Kuiper belt remained largely undiscovered until the 1990s, when objects other than Pluto and its moons began to be found....
Why is the Oort cloud important? Why are comets found in the Kuiper belt? Why does Rigel shine as brightly as Betelgeuse? Why do long period comets come from the Oort cloud? Why is the Oort cloud spherical? What makes Comet Encke unique?
The meeting recognized five dwarf planets – Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. But there may be another 100 dwarf planets in the solar system and hundreds more in and just outside the Kuiper Belt. Makemake– This object orbits the Sun every310 Earth years. Haumea– This is one of ...
Most obviously, it really enhances the fact that our actual moon does not have a name at all. Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos have names, all the planets have names, including exoplanets that only go by their automatically generated ones, and even the sun has a name. We don't call th...
one of the largest asteroids in the Kuiper belt, observed since 1930 was only measured correctly in 2015 (a paper by Alex Dias Oliveira was published in the November issue of the Astrophysical Journal and our value, I am one of the coauthor :), gives a quite similar value to the ...
The Kuiper belt is a flat circle around the outside of the penny (like Saturn’s rings), drawn as thick as it would be if you painted it with your fingertip. The Oort cloud isn’t a disk like the other two, it’s a sphere, starting about 30 centimeters (1 ft) away from the ...
It's an arbitrarily agreed upon but well-defined system of definitions that has served the astronomical community well for more than 100 years. *The Karman line that defines the edge of space. Where does the Earth's atmosphere end and outer space begin? Clearly, there is no physical ...
What is this big room we’re in, and who put us here? What is that bright yellow circle on the ceiling and where does it go every night? Where does the ocean end and what happens when you get there? Where are all the dead people now that they’re not here anymore?
This month, the Earth is being visited by a comet that is nearly close enough to see with the naked eye. If you do manage to spot it, you might notice that it gives off a green hue. A green color is pretty uncommon in space, so where does the comet get this color from?
you define the neighborhood, and how you define the biggest thing in the neighborhood. arguably, pluto could be the biggest thing in its zone because it makes as much as 7 percent of the kuiper belt by mass. some researchers have tried to come up with a quantifiable way of defining that...