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Astronomy

The red ragged edge

Nature volume 407, pages 953–955 (2000)Cite this article

It is not particularly surprising that the properties of asteroids should change between the inner and outer parts of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. After all, this belt marks the transition between the rocky planets of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer Solar System. What is perhaps more unexpected is that a similar transition should occur in the Kuiper belt — an even greater ring of icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune. Three years ago, Tegler and Romanishin1 reported the results of a photometric survey of these distant bodies, showing that they fall into two distinct groups based on their colour, but the reason for the two colours was a mystery. On page 979 of this issue2, Tegler and Romanishin present a follow-up survey that demonstrates a possible link between the colours of these objects and their distances from the Sun.

More than 150 years elapsed between the first calculations of the orbits of asteroids and the first observations that provided a real physical understanding of these bodies. The colour of sunlight reflected off asteroids can be measured through different-coloured filters. Such photometric measurements of several asteroids in the 1950s revealed that their colours fell into two main groups, which were interpreted as differing in surface composition. One group is only slightly redder than the Sun in colour, meaning that their surfaces reflect all wavelengths more or less equally, whereas the other group is significantly redder than the Sun because they absorb more of the blue sunlight. The first group tends to dominate the outer part of the asteroid belt, whereas the redder ones prevail in the inner belt.

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Figure 1: Snapshot of the outer Solar System, as it was on 16 October 2000.

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  1. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge , 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Brian G. Marsden

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  1. Brian G. Marsden
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Correspondence to Brian G. Marsden.

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Marsden, B. The red ragged edge. Nature 407, 953–955 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35039651

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