Astronomers have created the first “image” of the distribution of ice formed at the edges of the solar system 5 billion years ago. This composition was made possible thanks to the advanced capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope and the DiSCo project, from the Institute of Space Sciences and Technologies at the University of Oviedo, Spain.
Rocks found beyond Neptune’s orbit and in regions like the Kuiper Belt tend to be different from those closer to the Sun. In general, trans-Neptunian objects tend to be fragments of water ice, ammonia, or methane that are They move through icy dust. By comparison, near-Earth objects are composed of rock and metals.
Researchers don’t know for sure what a frozen trans-Neptunian object looks like. With the exception of bodies like Pluto, the rocks are too small and too far away to be observed with a conventional telescope. Until now, it was only possible to say that they look like space ice and that they usually emit weak reflections.
Ice on the shores of the solar system
The DiSCo project, led by scientist Noemi Pinilla-Alonso, has just identified the molecules responsible for offering the different spectra, colors and albedos recorded in objects in the region beyond Neptune. Thanks to this, it is now possible to simulate a much more realistic image of what those frozen fragments would look like if we could get close enough.
Furthermore, the results found that the content of trans-Neptunian objects is deeply linked to the availability of elements in the protoplanetary disk that gave birth to the solar system. The theory of the birth of stellar systems mentions that rocky materials tend to clump together in the regions close to the stars, while gases move towards the edges. For this reason, asteroids usually come from the region between Jupiter and Mars, while comets come from further away.
“The importance of this discovery lies in the fact that we can now affirm that the most determining factor in the current surface composition of these bodies is the material available in the presolar disk at the time of the formation of the planetesimals, solid objects with a diameter greater than one kilometer. In this way, the current state of these trans-Neptunian objects is closely linked to the ice inventory at the birth of the Solar System, as if it were a frozen snapshot of that time,” Pinilla-Alonso said in a statement. release from the University of Oviedo.
The outer regions of the solar system are considered more “calm” than the inner ones. The objects that inhabit the area have much more stable orbits and have remained unchanged since they formed. By identifying the predominant elements on the surface of trans-Neptunian objects, it is possible to infer how much space ice there was when the stellar neighborhood was just forming.
“We have discovered that trans-Neptunian objects can be classified into three different compositional groups, defined by the retention lines of ices such as water, carbon dioxide, methanol and processed organic materials that existed when the Solar System formed thousands of years ago. millions of years,” the author pointed out.
#image #shows #ice #edges #solar #system
