Kuiper Belt Collision Found; Possible Comet Source

siglercm writes "Astronomers have detected the remnants of an ancient collision in the Kuiper Belt, the region of bodies found outside of our solar system. The massive impact between a nearly Pluto-sized body and one half as large created a 'collisional family' of objects; this is the first such family identified in the Kuiper Belt. The largest body produced may cross Neptune's orbit in the distant future, but it's possible that smaller objects created by the smash-up have already fallen into the inner solar system as comets."

Comments

Kuiper Crash

[Stanistani]

How does the "dirty snowball" composition of comets fit into this theory?
Wouldn't the result resemble asteroids rather than comets?

Re:Kuiper Crash

[stratjakt]

The snowballs come from the kuiper belt, they get dirty when they brush up against Uranus.

hee hee. Imagine how boring astronomy would be if they didn't name Uranus what they did?

Re:Kuiper Crash

[Stanistani]

"Sorry, Fry, But scientists renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke."

What's it called now?"

"Urectum."

Re:Kuiper Crash

[siglercm]

I was really dense in reading your post at first. I think I understand your question now, but please let me know if I've got it wrong.

This is a possible source of some (few) comets (if I understand correctly). I don't believe there's any assertion that all comets come from this collision. The main object is mostly rocky, but they say the trailing small ones are icy. It's possible that some of these smaller bodies may have been perturbed from their orbits and fallen into the inner solar system as comets.

What about Pluto?

[benhocking]

What about Pluto, Charon, Hydra, and Nix? Couldn't they be such a family?

outside?

[Feyr]

outside of our solar system? neptune belongs to this solar system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

So they found Kzanol's ship?

[R2.0]

I guess Larry Niven had it right.

Re:How many planets could there be?

[Tablizer]

How far from the Sun could we expect to keep finding planets? Has anyone come up with an 'Outer Limit' for holding an object in orbit?

If its too far out, then it is more likely to be disturbed by other stars besides the sun (current or past). In theory the orbital boundary of the sun is nearly infinite. In practice, our neighborhood stars muck up any outer orbits. For a non-geek analogy, it is sort of like having kids and living next store to Michael Jackson.

Hill sphere comes close to what you want

[benhocking]

If you consider the nearest stars and/or the galaxy as a whole, you could calculate the Hill sphere for the Sun. I do believe that, in purely technical terms, it's large.

Try 800

[benhocking]

At least according to Wikipedia! (I had no idea we were up that high, either.)

shaped like a M&M

[daniel23]

I spent more than an hour reading about this and other finds on the homepage of one of the team who found that,
M.E.Brown

The Link has a animated model of the thing and a schematic of its structure that looks like candy..

Re:shaped like a M&M

[MadUndergrad]

It appears to have a thin crunchy shell of rock on the outside with a core composed primarily of rich dark matter.

reminiscient of Velikovsky

[mrtexe]

This reminds me of the work of Boris Velikovsky. Of course, citing him would be like a Christian seminarian citing the satanic bible.