HackingTheUniverse

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21 Lutetia is a main belt asteroid, about 100 kilometers in diameter and classified spectrally as M-type or metallic. Rosetta is a space probe that will fly by 21 Lutetia in July of 2010. Rosetta was launched in 2004 and is on a mission to investigate a comet in 2014. On the way to that [...]

It is possible (but not yet confirmed) that astronomers have observed a collision in the asteroid belt for the first time. Mystery Object Behaves Both Like a Comet and Asteroid – [discovery.com] Something awfully curious is happening 250 million miles away in the asteroid belt. Astronomers think they may be witnessing a never-before-seen collision between [...]

In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort (building on an idea originated by Ernst Opik) proposed that a hypothetical and massive cloud of comets that orbit far from the center of our solar system might explain why comets don’t seem to originate from deep space and often have an outer orbital edge about 20-50,000 AUs from [...]

Discovered in 1992, the Kuiper Belt is a large expanse of space just outside the edge of our solar system that contains a large number of small objects. This belt is similar to the asteroid belt, but is much larger, much farther away and may contain more frozen water and volatile gases than the metallic [...]