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KUIPER BELT

New clues to planet formation

Most binary Kuiper belt objects orbit each other in the same direction as their orbit around the Sun. New
computer simulations show that such orbits may be a fingerprint of planetesimal formation from collapsing
clumps of pebbles.

Anders Johansen

T
he minor bodies in our Solar System
— populating mainly the asteroid 0.3

belt between Mars and Jupiter,

the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune and the
Oort cloud orbiting several thousand 0.2
astronomical units from the Sun — are
surviving planetary building blocks from
the era of planet formation around the
Sun more than 4.5 billion years ago. As 0.1
such, they hold physical evidence about
the formation of planets, in contrast to the
eight planets in the Solar System whose
y (au)

primordial structure has been completely
erased by melting and gas accretion. The
size distribution of asteroids and Kuiper
belt objects has been used as evidence
that planetesimals formed by the so-called
streaming instability (described below)1–3,
but uncertainties remain about how much
the asteroid size distribution reflects the
planetesimal birth sizes and to what degree
the sizes have been affected by subsequent
collisions. Writing in Nature Astronomy,
Nesvorný et al.4 demonstrate that the
orientations of binary Kuiper belt objects
can be used as an additional, powerful
probe of planetesimal formation models.
The planetesimals orbiting beyond
Neptune, generally referred to as trans-
Neptunian objects, form distinct dynamical
groups5. Scattered disk objects have
perihelia (the closest approach to the Sun
of an elliptic orbit) near Neptune’s orbit,
while the resonant objects populate distinct
orbital resonances with Neptune. These two
populations, both connected dynamically to
Neptune, contain numerous dwarf planets,
most famously Pluto. Both scattered objects
and resonant objects probably formed closer
to the Sun and were pushed outwards by
Neptune’s gravity as the outermost planet
migrated outwards after its formation6.
The classical Kuiper belt, in contrast,
consists of planetesimals whose orbits
never come close to Neptune’s orbit. The
classical Kuiper belt objects with the lowest
eccentricities and inclinations are called cold
classicals and probably formed in situ at the
outer edges of the protoplanetary disk of gas
and dust that orbited the newly born Sun
794
0
− 0.1
− 0.2
− 0.3
− 0.3 − 0.2 − 0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3
x (au)
Fig. 1 | Formation of two prograde planetesimal binaries through the streaming instability. The simulation
box represents a small region in a protoplanetary disk at a distance of 40 au from the host star. The two
insets show zoomed-in views of the two newly formed binaries; the white curves indicate their relative
motion over the next three time steps. The orbits are very clearly prograde (the rotation direction of
the protoplanetary disk is upwards). Inspired by the results presented in Nesvorný et al., I analysed the
orientation of the binary orbits in this high-resolution simulation originally presented in ref. 2 and found
approximately 80% prograde and 20% retrograde, in excellent agreement with Nesvorný et al. In contrast
to Nesvorný et al., the simulation presented here uses sink particles to capture the dynamics of the newly
formed planetesimals. But the resolution element of approximately 200,000 km is far from sufficient to
cover the full gravitational collapse. Nesvorný et al. solved this in an elegant way, by performing separate
N-body simulations of the collapse phase. Figure adapted from ref. 2, AAAS.
4.5 billion years ago. The cold classical do not stick well when they collide and drift
Kuiper belt objects are small, with diameters towards the star because of friction with the
below 500 km, indicating little or no gas8. One possible solution is provided by
collisional growth since their formation7. the streaming instability, which is a physical
Planetesimals were originally thought mechanism whereby the energy present in
to form by gradual collisional growth from the radial flow of pebbles towards the star
dust grains to kilometre sizes. However, is converted to turbulent motion of gas and
such models are hampered by the inefficient particles8,9. Computer simulations of the
growth around a bottleneck at pebbles of streaming instability have shown that dense
millimetre to centimetre sizes. These pebbles filaments of pebbles arise spontaneously
Nature Astronomy | VOL 3 | SEPTEMBER 2019 | 794–795 | www.nature.com/natureastronomy

in the turbulence and that the gravity
between the pebbles leads to a gravitational
contraction to form planetesimals with
a characteristic size of 100 km (ref. 10).
Both the characteristic size and the size
distribution are in remarkably good
agreement with what is observed
for cold classical Kuiper belt objects2,3.
Nesvorný et al. demonstrate that the
cold classical Kuiper belt objects display
another useful property for understanding
planetesimal formation, namely their high
fraction of binary planetesimals.
Surveys have revealed that at least 20%
of classical Kuiper belt objects are binaries11
and another 20% or more are contact
binaries12. The orbits of such binary objects
are measured to be dominantly prograde,
meaning that the binary components orbit
around each other in the same direction
as their common orbit around the Sun13.
This appears to be in direct conflict with
alternative scenarios where a binary is
established from a gravitational dance
between three passing planetesimals,
leaving two of them bound and the
third carrying away the excess energy.
Nesvorný et al. analyse the rotation of
pebble clumps formed by the streaming
instability and find very good agreement
with the observed dominance of prograde
orbits. Figure 1 shows data from a
high-resolution computer simulation
originally presented in ref. 2, which confirms
the formation of predominantly prograde
binaries by this mechanism.
The study by Nesvorný et al. brings
further evidence that planetesimals in the
Solar System formed by the streaming
instability. Additional support for the
streaming instability comes from the size
distribution of asteroids and Kuiper belt
Nature Astronomy | VOL 3 | SEPTEMBER 2019 | 794–795 | www.nature.com/natureastronomy
objects1–3 as well as the in situ studies of
the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
by the Rosetta mission: a wide range of
evidence points to this comet consisting
entirely of pebbles of millimetre to
centimetre sizes14. The classical Kuiper belt
object MU69, which New Horizons flew by
on 1 January 2019, famously turned out to
be a contact binary15 — the collapse
perhaps the result of eccentricity pumping
of a planetesimal binary formed by the
streaming instability.
A limitation in the study of Nesvorný et al.
is the inability to numerically resolve the
gravitational collapse phase. The authors
employ the trick of performing separate
N-body simulations of the collapse phase
for their pebble clumps, but this separation
necessarily ignores the role of the gas
flow during the collapse. Adaptive mesh
refinement is a methodology commonly
used in galaxy formation simulations,
whereby regions of interest can be simulated
at increasingly higher resolution16. Adopting
such techniques to planetesimal formation
simulations could allow more self-consistent
models in the future.
The study by Nesvorný et al. also raises
a philosophical question common to all
studies of Solar System formation: to what
degree can an observation be used to infer
what happened billions of years ago? While
it is certainly possible to conclude that
planetesimal formation by the streaming
instability is consistent with a number of
properties of minor bodies in the Solar
System, proving that planetesimals actually
formed by the streaming instability
will be nearly impossible. Many other
mechanisms for concentrating pebbles
into dense clumps have been identified,
including concentration in giant vortices
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and pressure bumps8, and finding out
the relative importance of all these
mechanisms and how they interact should
be an important priority for future studies.
Nevertheless, studying the outcome of
the streaming instability in computer
simulations like the one presented by
Nesvorný et al. provides planet formation
theorists with a toolbox of physical
processes that can be used to decipher
how planetesimals formed in the
Solar System. ❐
Anders Johansen
Lund Observatory, Department of Astronomy and
Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
e-mail: anders@astro.lu.se
Published online: 9 September 2019
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0855-3
References
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