Icy bodies at Solar System’s edge found during target hunt for NASA spacecraft
There just doesn’t seem to be enough of the Solar System. Beyond Neptune’s orbit lie thousands of small icy objects in the Kuiper belt, with Pluto its most famous resident. But after 50 astronomical units —50 times the distance between Earth and the Sun—the belt ends suddenly and the number of objects drops to zero. Meanwhile, in other solar systems, similar belts stretch outward across hundreds of AU. It’s disquieting, says Wesley Fraser, an astronomer at the National Research Council Canada.
The discovery, being prepared for publication and not yet peer reviewed, is supported by measurements from New Horizons itself, which at 57 AU continues to streak beyond the edge of the known Kuiper belt. Many of its instruments are in hibernation, but a dust counterduring the mission. Dust is a telltale sign of colliding planetary bodies, and so the New Horizons team expected the amount of dust to fall off steeply after the probe left the Kuiper belt, where it had.
Stern would welcome more icy bodies to study. After threats to shift New Horizons from planetary science to heliophysics—the study of the Sun and its plasma-filled envelope—, extending the mission’s current focus until the decade’s end. That means the probe could still visit another object like Arrokoth, if one exists, Stern says. “We have the opportunity to do science that we know we can do—and can’t be done other ways—for a very long time.
To boost the signal, the team electronically combines hundreds of images from a night of observation, hoping a bright blob will appear along a likely trajectory. Initially, the team examined the images manually, sifting through 15,000 candidates a night. “You go blind pretty quickly,” Fraser says. Now, artificial intelligence makes the screening much less painful. “We went from a week of agony for an army of people to 6 hours of vetting.
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