Related papers: All planetesimals born near the Kuiper Belt formed…
Colors and binarity provide important constraints on the Kuiper belt formation. The cold classical objects at radial distance r=42-47 au from the Sun are predominantly very red (spectral slope s>17%) and often exist as equal-size binaries…
The Classical Kuiper Belt is populated by a group of objects with low inclination orbits, reddish colors and usually belonging to a binary system. This so called Cold Classical Kuiper Belt is considered to have been formed in situ from…
The cold classical Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) possess a high, $\gtrsim30\%$ binary fraction. Widely separated and dynamically fragile, these binary systems have been useful in tracing the origins of KBOs. A new class of binaries was…
The discovery that many trans-neptunian objects exist in pairs, or binaries, is proving invaluable for shedding light on the formation, evolution and structure of the outer Solar system. Based on recent systematic searches it has been…
A large fraction of 100-km-class low-inclination objects in the classical Kuiper Belt (KB) are binaries with comparable mass and wide separation of components. A favored model for their formation was capture during the coagulation growth of…
The g'r'i' colors of seven likely and potential contact binaries in the Kuiper belt were acquired with the Magellan-Baade telescope and combined with colors from the literature to understand contact binary surfaces. The likely and potential…
The existence of extremely wide binaries in the low-inclination component of the Kuiper Belt provides a unique handle on the dynamical history of this population. Some popular frameworks of the formation of the Kuiper Belt suggest that…
As indicated by their special characteristics, the cold classical Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) formed and survived at 42-47 au. Notably, they show a large fraction of equal-size binaries whose formation is probably related to the accretion of…
It appears that at least several percent of large Kuiper belt objects are members of wide binaries. Physical collisions are too infrequent to account for their formation. Collisionless gravitational interactions are more promising. These…
Nearly one-third of objects occupying the most circular, coplanar Kuiper belt orbits (the cold classical belt) are binary, and several percent of them are "ultra-wide" binaries (UWBs): 100-km-sized companions spaced by tens of thousands of…
A critical step toward the emergence of planets in a protoplanetary disk consists in accretion of planetesimals, bodies 1-1000 km in size, from smaller disk constituents. This process is poorly understood partly because we lack good…
Recent observations have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper-belt. The discovered binaries have four characteristics they comprise a few percent of the TNOs, the…
Cold Classical Kuiper belt objects (CCKBOs) are considered first-generation planetesimals that formed 42-47 au from the Sun and remained untouched since. Formation is thought to proceed by clumping of dust particles in protoplanetary disk…
Recent observations (Burnes et al 2002,Veillet et al 2002, Margot et al 2002a) have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper Belt. The TNO binaries are strikingly…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…
We present observations of two binary systems within the cold classical region of the Kuiper belt$-$2001 XR254 and 2016 BP81$-$obtained with the JWST Near-Infrared Spectrograph. The measured reflectance spectrum of 2001 XR254 is…
The non-resonant Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) between the 3:2 and 2:1 Neptunian mean motion resonances can be largely divided between a cold classical belt (CCB) and a hot classical belt (HCB). A notable difference between these two…
Planetesimal formation likely lasted for millions of years in the solar nebula, and the cold classicals in the Kuiper Belt are suggested to be the direct products of streaming instability. The presence of minor planetary bodies in the outer…
We propose a chemical and dynamical process to explain the surface colors of the Kuiper belt. In our hypothesis, the initial bulk compositions of the bodies themselves can be quite diverse -- as is seen in comets -- but the early surface…
Approximately 10-20% of all Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) occupy mean-motion resonances with Neptune. This dynamical configuration likely resulted from resonance capture as Neptune migrated outward during the late stages of planet formation.…