On average, 10 long-period and 20 short-period comets cross Earth's orbit each year. Short-periodcomets orbit the Sunin less than 200 years and exist in the Kuiper Belt just beyond Neptune, while long-period comets take longer to orbit the Sun and exist in the Oort Cloud even farther a...
How did comets come to exist in the Kuiper belt? Why is Ceres in the asteroid belt? Why is Neptune blue? Is there ice on the planet? Why are there only gas planets beyond the asteroid belt? Why is Halley's Comet named after Edmund Halley? Why does an elliptical galaxy look...
The fact that Pluto CAN’T exist close to the Sun means we are going to find all kinds of great new “stuff” when we finally get out there. I’ll bet all the objects we find in the Kuiper Belt have multiple moons, a second huge asteroid belt and comet graveyard. I wish the sci...
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 ...
I am not saying that we should give up looking for evidence of life on Mars, only that we should look in other places too, Europa and the Kuiper Belt and giant molecular clouds. Wherever there is water and carbon and nitrogen and starlight, life might already be teeming. I am willing ...
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?
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...
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...