Kuiper Belt
-
NASA
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health
Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting science data gathered in the distant Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto. From left, flight controllers Mark Lahr and Josh Albers, and Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, monitor telemetry streaming from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to…
Read More » -
NASA
NASA Webb Finds Young Sun-Like Star Forging, Spewing Common Crystals
Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form and these “dirty snowballs” spend most of their time in the ultracold Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Now, looking outside our solar system, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has returned the first conclusive evidence that links how those conditions are…
Read More » -
NASA
NASA’s Hubble Sees White Dwarf Eating Piece of Pluto-Like Object
In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could identify that this meal is taking place. The stellar remnant is a white dwarf about half the mass of our Sun, but that is densely packed into a body about the size of Earth. Scientists think…
Read More » -
NASA
NASA’s Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio
The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show “3 Body Problem.” There’s no problem, however, with what a team of researchers say is likely a stable trio of icy space rocks in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, found using…
Read More » -
NASA
NASA’s New Horizons Detects Dusty Hints of Extended Kuiper Belt
New observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt – the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks – might stretch much farther out than we thought. Artist’s concept of a collision between two objects in the distant Kuiper Belt. Such collisions are a major source of…
Read More »