Researchers estimate that the number of captured free-floating planets in the outer solar system with mass strictly greater than that of Mars is ∼1.2 and that the number of such planets with a strict cutoff at the mass of Mercury is ∼2.4. When they instead adopt logarithmic bins centered at the Mars mass and the …
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be sensitive to even lower-mass rogue planets since it will observe from space. It will have wide field of view and sharp vision which will allow us to study the objects it finds in more detail than we can do using only ground-based telescopes. In 2023, researchers estimate it …
New NASA research confirms that Saturn is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated from Voyager 1 & 2 observations made decades ago. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field. “We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains …
Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. 2015 TG387 was discovered about 80 …
It is estimated that there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer Solar System and possibly more than 10,000 in the region beyond. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has accepted four as official dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, as well as Ceres in the inner Solar System. Philip …