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In the confines of the solar system, the Sun faintly illuminates millions of rocky and icy bodies known as objects of the Kuiper belt orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. But, surprisingly, little is known about these worlds: the most advanced terrestrial telescopes, even the Hubble Space Telescope, have trouble solving any diameter less than 100 kilometers or so. Now, studying the craters of Pluto and its largest moon, the researchers determined that the Kuiper Belt probably contains far fewer small objects measuring a few kilometers than previously thought. This discovery highlights the formation of the solar system billions of years ago, suggest the researchers.
A treasure of craters
"We certainly have not seen any craters before New Horizons."
Singer and his colleagues did more than count the craters: they wanted to know more about the Kuiper Belt objects that produced these features. Identifying small craters would help scientists learn more about these small objects that we could not otherwise see.
A lack of small
Scientists have applied a proven scale law establishing a relationship between the size of an impactor – in this case an object of the Kuiper belt – and the size of the crater obtained. When they calculated the size distribution of the Kuiper belt objects, they found a relative shortage of smaller bodies, measuring 1 to 2 kilometers in diameter.
The researchers suggest that this deficit is probably real, instead of being the result of tectonic activity or a landslide destroying or covering the smaller craters. This is because the trend has persisted in a part of Charon known as Vulcan Planitia, which is supposed to be geologically inactive for about 4 billion years. These results were published today in Science.
This result helps to constrain solar system formation patterns, suggest the researchers. Rather than assembling the solar system from an incalculable number of smaller and more kilometric bodies, as suggested by the theory, these new findings suggest that it could have developed from comparatively larger objects, about 100 kilometers in diameter.
Singer and his colleagues are eager to study the craters on another distant object revealed by New Horizons: 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule, an object of the Kuiper belt that the probe flew over January 1, 2019. It's a work in progress, Singer said. "We're just getting more pictures back now."
-Katherine Kornei ([email protected]; @katherinekornei), Independent Scientific Journalist
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doi: 10.1029 /.
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