Kuiper belt

Comets, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud

Discipline: 
Education

Comets

Comets are small, irregularly shaped bodies in the solar system composed mainly of ice and dust that typically measure a few kilometers across. They travel around the sun in very elliptical orbits that bring them very close to the Sun, and then send them out past Neptune. There are two categories of comet, based on the amount of time they take to orbit the Sun. Short-period comets take less than 200 years, and long-period comets take over 200 years, with some taking 100,000 to 1 million years to orbit the Sun.

Tags: 
Kuiper belt
Oort cloud

The TAOS Project: Upper Bounds on the Population of Small Kuiper Belt Objects and Tests of Models of Formation and Evolution ...

We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey (TAOS). TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). This data set comprises 5 × 105 star hours of multi-telescope photometric data taken at 4 or 5 Hz. No events consistent with KBO occultations were found in this data set. We compute the number of events expected for the Kuiper Belt formation and evolution models of Pan & Sari, Kenyon & Bromley, Benavidez & Campo Bagatin, and Fraser.
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 139, Issue 4, pp. 1499-1514 (2010).