A recent collaboration between the Subaru Telescope and NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has led to the discovery of a potential new population of small astronomical objects in the Kuiper Belt. This finding is crucial for understanding the formation of our solar system.
New Horizons, launched in 2006, flew by Pluto in 2015 and another Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in 2019. While other spacecraft have visited the outer solar system, New Horizons is the only one to have traversed the Kuiper Belt.
The Subaru Telescope’s ultra-widefield prime focus camera has played a key role in this discovery. By observing Kuiper Belt objects from the ground, scientists can only see them at small solar phase angles. However, when viewed from space within the Kuiper Belt, these objects can be observed at different phase angles, allowing for more accurate surface property estimates.
The collaboration between Subaru and New Horizons began in 2004. In 2020, deeper observations with the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope led to the discovery of 239 Kuiper Belt objects by 2023.
What’s exciting is that 11 of these objects were found at distances beyond the known Kuiper Belt. A large number are located between 30 and 55 astronomical units from the Sun, but there appears to be a cluster of objects in the 70-90 au region with only a few objects distributed between 55 and 70 au.
The discovery of this new population could imply that the primordial solar nebula was larger than previously thought, which may have implications for understanding planet formation. Scientists are continuing observations to determine the precise orbits of these objects.
New Horizons is currently traveling further out, hoping to discover more distant objects. The findings will be published in two articles in the Planetary Science Journal and are available on the arXiv preprint server.
Source: https://www.earth.com/news/mysterious-objects-spotted-in-the-outer-solar-system-beyond-pluto/