A new method of scanning telescope images for faint traces of rock far beyond Pluto provides evidence that our solar system’s disk of matter extends much deeper into interstellar space than we thought. It was revealed.
Decades of peering The light into the shadow left astronomers with the distinct impression that it was a diffuse region of icy rock known as the Kuiper Belt. suddenly lose weight From 48 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun (or 48 astronomical units).
An endless belt of debris was seen at least twice that distance Our solar system is much smaller in comparison, as it is around a comparable star. With this new discovery, we may not be so rare after all.
A team of astronomers led by Canada’s Herzberg Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics Research wanted to discover new targets for the New Horizons spacecraft to study as it travels to the outer reaches of the solar system.
After snapping some close-ups of Pluto, the mission snapped a photo of a snowman-shaped rock about 40 astronomical units from the sun, before zipping along at just under 60,000 kilometers per hour (about 36,000 miles per hour). I continued my journey.
At a distance of about 60 astronomical units from the Sun, finding out what this brave little spacecraft has to observe will be no easy task. To discover what moves in the eternal dead of night, astronomers need to be smart.
One commonly used technique is shift stacking. With so little light at the edge of the solar system, very few objects are visible in a single telescope image.
By taking photos at different times and overlaying the images, you can combine all the light from dim objects into one point for increased visibility.
This is fine if you know the path of the target. Finding undetected objects this way requires a lot of trial and error, adjusting stacks of images along potential trajectories until a shiny gem emerges.
Even when aided by computer algorithms, searching for hidden rocks in stacks of hundreds of shifting images requires old-fashioned human power and a lot of effort.
To take at least some of the tedium out of the process and speed things up, the researchers used machine learning to train a neural network on fictitious objects inserted into telescope images, then subaru telescope Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 2020 and 2021.
Compared to human searches of the 2020 data, machine learning techniques identified twice as many Kuiper Belt objects, and the density of matter was identified at distances of approximately 60 to 80 AU along New Horizons’ orbit. This suggests that there is a clear increase in
The result could help explain the unusual glow detected by both the spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope, in which extra debris contributes to the reflective dust clumps in the outer solar system.
Given that similar surveys of other parts of the sky failed to detect such an abundance of orbiting objects, we wonder if they were simply unlucky or if there is something special in the solar system along New Horizons’ path. It’s worth wondering if there is a point or if machine learning techniques have some points in place. Defects to be resolved.
The findings have not yet been peer-reviewed and need to be confirmed by future ground- and space-based studies.
But taken at face value, our solar system is likely to have at least two “rings” of icy material separated by a gap of about 50 astronomical units. One is made up of the well-known Kuiper belt, and the other is made up of extensive icy rocks that reach as far away as Pluto is from us.
Of course, why such a gap exists is an interesting mystery in itself.
This research 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2023.
