Astronomy 1021 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, Terrestrial Planet

• School: Western University
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: Astronomy 1021
• Professor: Trevor Kirsh

Document Summary

Jupiter: the other asteroids follow jupiter"s orbit called trojan asteroids. Where do comets come from: comets come from two reservoirs: the. Neptune: a few, including pluto has moons, triton, neptune"s moon, was likely to be captured from the kuiper belt. Are pluto and eris planets: of cially they are classi ed as dwarf planets, no matter what you call them, their properties clearly identify them as the members of the kuiper belt. Have we ever witnessed a major impact: in 1994, we observed the impacts of. Comet shoemaker levy 9 on jupiter: the comet had fragmented into a string of individual nuclei, so there was a string of impacts that left jupiter"s atmosphere scarred for months. Is the impact threat a read danger or media hype: the probability is fairly low, they occur every couple of hundred of years, and it would be catastrophic if they occurred over cities.