SYDNEY: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft—the probe which recently traveled to Pluto to study the most distant object in our solar system—captured the most defining and distinct photos of Pluto to date. Of course, we won’t see any of those pictures for another year, at least, because that is how long it takes to beam them back to Earth.
That is how far away Pluto is from our planet.
But in the meantime, New Horizons is now freed up to explore another mysterious entity in our solar system. Or, at least, to help us find more such objects.
Indeed, NASA Science Mission Directorate John Grunsfeld “Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer.”
Right now, for example, Carnegie Institute astronomer Scott Sheppard reports that there are probably about 1,500 icy bodies in the Kuiper belt—the asteroid belt of the Milky Way galaxy—with some large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet (slightly smaller than Pluto, perhaps, or, more accurately, nearly the same size as the recently explored Ceres).
“A massive object or great disturber would perturb or disturb anything that came close to it. So objects that stay away from the great disturber would be the most stable objects,” Sheppard shares. “Thus the great disturber can ‘shepherd’ objects into similar types of orbits with similar arguments of perihelion which are the orbits which constantly keep the smaller objects away from the bigger object.”
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