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Quaoar Showing Evidence of Volcanic Activity

Posted by michael on from the long-way-out dept.

calibanDNS writes "Recent findings at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy indicate that there may be volcanic activity on at least one object in the Kuiper belt."

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  1. Re:a bit of wishful thinking... by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Large collisions would be pretty rare in the Kuiper Belt. There just isn't enough stuff around. Worse, they occur at low speeds. So you wouldn't expect to generate a lot of melting that way. It's possible, of course. But it's an eyebrow-raiser.

    "Particulate venting"? You mean volatile sublimation, like comets when they get near the Sun? I don't know of any asteroids that do that. And Quaoar is much too far from the Sun to expect that sort of behavior. (The maximum temperature you would expect is around 50 Kelvins. And that assumes an albedo of 0, which can't be the case if they can see it in the visible wavelengths.)