A hunt for the smallest members of the Kuiper Belt — a disk of icy cold objects at the Solar System's edge — has revealed a potential source of local comets.
Hilke Schlichting at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues made use of the Hubble Space Telescope's Fine Guidance Sensors to search the Kuiper Belt. These sensors stabilize the telescope by watching distant stars, which are occasionally eclipsed by a passing Kuiper Belt Object. By trawling more than nine years' worth of data, the team found a single candidate for a new object just 530 metres across. Combining that result with a previous one, the team estimates that small objects in the Kuiper Belt are abundant enough to be the source of the short-period comets observed in the inner Solar System.
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From the Kuiper Belt to comets. Nature 492, 314 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/492314b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/492314b
