Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Main Asteroid belt (main belt), between Mars and Jupiter, in near circular orbit, 2.2 to 3.2 AU Hungaria asteroids, small group, 1.78 to 2.00 AU; Alinda asteroids, small group, 2.5 AU in elliptical orbits; Hilda asteroid small group just inside Jupiter, 4.0 AU; Kuiper belt large belt, 43 to 64.5 AU; Scattered disc small group, 21.5 to 215 AU
The Kuiper belt (/ ˈ k aɪ p ər / KY-pər) [1] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [2] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive.
The Kuiper belt extends between Neptune's orbit at 35 AU and ~55 AU. The most massive classical Kuiper belt objects have semi-major axis between 39 AU and 48 AU corresponding to the 2:3 and 1:2 resonances with Neptune. The Kuiper belt is thought to consist of planetesimals and dwarf planets from the original protoplanetary disc in which the ...
This formula is a simplified version of that in section 2.2 of Stansberry et al., 2007, [39] where emissivity and beaming parameter were assumed to equal unity, and was replaced with 4, accounting for the difference between circle and sphere. All parameters mentioned above were taken from the same paper.
The Kuiper belt is a great ring of debris similar to the asteroid belt, but consisting mainly of objects composed primarily of ice. [195] It extends between 30 and 50 AU from the Sun. It is composed mainly of small Solar System bodies, although the largest few are probably large enough to be dwarf planets. [196]
In 1994, Ostro and his colleague R. Scott Hudson developed and published a three-dimensional shape model of Castalia reconstructed from the 1989 radar images, providing the first radar shape model of a contact binary asteroid. [8] In 1992, the Kuiper belt was discovered and astronomers subsequently began observing and measuring light curves of ...
The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars.
In the current Solar System, these small bodies are usually also classified by dynamics and composition, and may have subsequently evolved [10] [11] [12] to become comets, Kuiper belt objects or trojan asteroids, for example.