GEOL 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 62: Orbital Period, Methane Clathrate, Occultation

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27 Dec 2017
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This hypothetical region of the solar system was called the kuiper belt after gerard kuiper, who performed pioneering work in the concept. Earth"s mass, estimates were revised steady downward during the 20th century. Now known to be 0. 00218 earth masses: charon: 1978 - the large moon of pluto. Since then, many more (>1700) trans-neptunian objects have been identified. Based on what we have found, it is expected that there are perhaps 70,000 tnos having diameter greater than 100 km. Estimates of the total mass of the belt range from 20 to 200 times the mass of the inner asteroid belt. Most of these hypothetical objects are probably far smaller than our detection threshold (~100 km diameter. ) The largest tnos appear to scale in the illustration at right: some of them are binary objects, like pluto and its family of moons (e. g. also: eris and dysnomia), compositions certainly include abundant ices, but otherwise enigmatic.

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