Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble

segment writes "Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation. The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at a meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif."

Comments

creation of the solar system

[jlemmerer]

I would fond it interesting how the scientists can be sure that there objects have originated when our solar system was created. Wouldn't it be also possible that the asteroids traveled vast distances, having originated in stellar events far away, and eventually gor captured by sub's gravity? This would be even more interesting for us, wouldn't it. I just would like to know if it would be feasible to launch a probe to one of those objects, as to look of what materials it is composed. But can you hit an object that small across this distance and, even more land a probe safely there?

Pluto express..

[adeyadey]

This could be bad news for the New Horizons (Pluto-Kuiper Belt) mission, which plans to visit some as-yet undiscovered Kuiper belt objects after swinging by Pluto - but if there are a lot fewer than first thought..

Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt Objects than was predicted makes it difficult to understand how so many comets appear near Earth since many comets were thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt,..

Not big bang. Our sun is 2nd generation.

[MickLinux]

The reminants of the big bang (or universal black hole collapse, as I like to think of it... but that's nonstandard) would be the background radiation, nothing more.

After the big bang, you had the cooling out of our different forces, the formation of subatomic particles, the formation of Hydrogen atoms, and then the formation of giant stars.

Those stars all exploded long ago, creating the wealth of other elements that we see today. Life may or may not have formed at that time, but if it did, it is my guess that all such lifeforms would have been destroyed in the supernovaes of the first generation of stars. Our solar system formed from the exploded remains of one or more of those.

All of which makes these fossils impressively old, the moreso because it is not inconcievable to me that bacteria could predate planetary formation. It would indeed be interesting to look at them, and see what we see.