For the first time, astronomers have discovered a celestial body with a radius of 1.3 kilometers on the edge of the solar system. The existence of bodies the size of several kilometers, like this, was supposed to be 70 years ago. These objects, when forming planets, are an important link between the small aggregates of dust and ice and the planets that we see today.
The Kuiper belt is a large group of bodies located outside the orbit of Neptune. The most famous Kuiper Belt object is Pluto. Kuiper belt objects are believed to be remnants of material since the formation of the solar system. While small bodies in the inner part of the solar system, such as the asteroids of the main asteroid belt, have been subject to changes over time as a result of solar radiation, collisions and gravity of the planets, objects of the Kuiper cold, dark and secluded belt have remained unchanged since the formation of the solar system. Therefore, astronomers study them to obtain information about the processes of the formation of planets.
The Kuiper belt objects with a radius of several kilometers are too far, too small in size and brightness to be observed directly even with the most powerful modern telescopes, such as the Subaru telescope. Therefore, in the new work, a group of researchers led by Ko Arimatsu (Ko Arimatsu) from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used a method based on an eclipse of a star by an object of the Kuiper belt during the passage of an object in front of a star. The team of the sky review of Organized Autotelescopes for Serendipitous Event Survey (OASES) placed two small, 28-cm telescopes on the roof of the school in Okinawa Prefecture and observed approximately 2000 stars for 60 hours.
After analyzing the collected data, the team confirmed an eclipse of one of the stars by an object in front of it of a Kuiper belt with a radius of 1.3 kilometers. This finding suggests that kilometer-sized Kuiper belt objects are more numerous than previously thought. And this, in turn, speaks in favor of the model, according to which planetesimals first grow to objects a few kilometers in size, and then rapidly merge into larger bodies, such as planets.
The missing link in the theory of the planet formation discovered
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