ASTRO-110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, Semi-Major And Semi-Minor Axes
Document Summary
Kuiper belt comets & pluto the kuiper belt of comets ranges from roughly neptune"s orbit at 30 au from the sun to about 50 au from the sun. Using large telescopes, astronomers have managed to locate and track more than. Based on these observations, we can estimate that there are at least 70,000 comets larger than 100 km across, and at least a few hundred million objects around 10 km across. We have even found an odd object, 170 km across, called chiron orbiting between. It was originally believed to be a misplaced asteroid. But since it recently developed a coma, it must be a kuiper belt object. Pluto has a faint atmosphere when it is closest to the sun (coma) Neptune"s moon triton is even larger than pluto and seems to be a captured kuiper belt object. More than a dozen kuiper belt objects have the same period and semimajor axis as.
