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Planetary science

Kuiper-belt interlopers

Nature volume 422, pages 30–31 (2003)Cite this article

Objects in the Kuiper belt, which lies beyond Neptune, occur as two distinct populations. One group may have migrated from a region closer to the Sun, caught by Neptune's gravity as it wandered in the early Solar System.

When astronomers first postulated the existence of a belt of small bodies beyond Neptune — now called the Kuiper belt — they imagined a disk of planetesimals (primordial icy bodies) in which the conditions of the early Solar System were perfectly preserved. But when these objects were finally discovered, astronomers realized that this is not so: the Kuiper belt is dynamically excited, as if something had kicked it very hard. The origin of this excitation is a central question in planetary astronomy today, because it could give vital clues to the origin of the planets. Writing in Icarus, Rodney Gomes1 proposes a new mechanism that can explain a lot of what we see. If he is right, much of the structure of the Kuiper belt has been generated by a slow, outward migration of Neptune's orbit during the last phases of its birth.

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Figure 1: On the origin of the 'hot' Kuiper-belt population.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, 06304, France

    A. Morbidelli

  2. Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Boulder, 80302, Colorado, USA

    H. F. Levison

Authors
  1. A. Morbidelli
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  2. H. F. Levison
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Correspondence to A. Morbidelli or H. F. Levison.

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Morbidelli, A., Levison, H. Kuiper-belt interlopers. Nature 422, 30–31 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/422030a

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