EXPLORING GALAXY HORIZONS

The New Horizons spacecraft flew by a strange object at the edge of our solar
system. Just a hazy form resembling a snowman on the day of the spacecraft’s
closest approach, Arrokoth is now taking shape to be a fascinating and revelatory
member of the region of the solar system beyond Neptune's orbit known as the
Kuiper Belt.

“Gravity is a universal force and acts like a glue to grow planetesimals

bigger and bigger once they form,” says David Nesvorný of the Southwest
Research Institute, who was a co-author of one of the new studies. “But
that's not true about the initial stage, when you just have dust particles in a
disk sticking together through molecular forces to make pebbles. Gravity
isn’t very important there. So what’s the ‘glue’ that lets things grow to
produce 10- or 100-kilometer objects?”
More certainty could come from New Horizons as it journeys deeper into
the Kuiper Belt. With heat and power for its instruments provided by the
gradual decay of long-lasting nuclear isotopes, the mission could continue
its explorations well into the 2030s (provided NASA keeps funding its
operations). The spacecraft’s 10 kilograms or so of remaining propellant are
unlikely to suffice for another post-Pluto flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, but
the team is still ardently seeking other possible targets using some of the
largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. Meanwhile they are employing
New Horizons’s far more modest 21-centimeter telescope to remotely study
Kuiper Belt objects passing by in the distance. Such studies will not return
gorgeous images. But they could still surpass any observations from Earth’s
vicinity, providing measurements of shapes, spins and surface properties
for perhaps 50 or 100 additional objects—enough to form a statistically
significant sample and, just maybe, to settle the planetesimal debate for
good.