 Nemesis

near-Earth object: impact

The impact of a near-Earth object 66 million years ago in what is today the Caribbean region, as
depicted in an artist's conception. Many scientists believe that the collision of a large asteroid or
comet nucleus with Earth triggered the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species near
the end of the Cretaceous Period.

NASA; illustration by Don Davis

In 1984 paleontologists David Raup and J. John Sepkoski published a paper claiming that
major extinctions occurred with a regular period of 26 million years. Two different groups
of astronomers proposed an explanation: The Sun has an undiscovered companion
star, Nemesis (named after the Greek goddess of retribution), that orbits every 26 million years. When
Nemesis is at its closest point to the Sun, it disturbs the comets in the Oort cloud, sending a shower
of comets inward. Some hit Earth and cause extinctions, such as that which doomed the dinosaurs 66
million years ago. Because it has not been seen, Nemesis would have to be a very dim object, like a
red dwarf star or even a brown dwarf. Nearly every aspect of this hypothesis has proved controversial.
Many paleontologists do not agree that extinction is periodic. Several astronomers have noted that
such a wide orbit would easily be disrupted by passing stars. But the clincher is that, as with Nibiru
and Tyche, subsequent surveys that observed the entire sky at infrared wavelengths would have
spotted Nemesis—and, so far, they have not.
Families, binaries, and satellites

Haumea

Artist's rendering of Haumea and its moons.

The Kuiper belt is likely to contain families of objects—that is, populations of objects that are likely to
have been derived from a single parent body. The members of a family would have similar heliocentric
orbital parameters and surface properties. Only one such group, the nine-member Haumea family, is
currently well established. The Haumea family members have orbital parameters that are much more
similar than would be expected from standard family production. Modeling the production of the
Haumea family, an important step toward confirming that these groups really do come from a single
progenitor object, is an ongoing field of research.

Pluto; Charon

Pluto and its largest moon, Charon (left), as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. They orbit around
their centre of gravity, and Charon always faces the same hemisphere of Pluto. Charon also always shows
the same hemisphere because it is in a state of synchronous rotation; that is, it spins on its axis in the
same time it takes to orbit Pluto.(more)
Pairs of near-equal-sized KBOs that are gravitationally bound together are called binary KBOs. Of the
known cold classical KBOs, 15 to 20 percent are in binary systems. The Pluto-Charon system is binary but
is unusual in the compactness of the system. The production of binary KBOs requires a large initial
population of KBOs, many times larger than that currently observed, for capture into binary pairs to have
been possible. Alternatively, binary KBOs might result from a turbulence mechanism at work during the
formation of planetesimals in the Kuiper belt. The existence of Kuiper belt binaries appears to preclude a
major gravitational scattering of sources in this population, as such effects would have disrupted the
observed systems.

A few percent of all KBOs are found to have satellites. The term satellite is used instead of binary when
there is a large (+10) mass ratio between the primary KBO and the orbiting material. Satellites likely form
when two KBOs collide and some of the disrupted material is captured into orbit around large surviving
members. The KBO Haumea has at least two such satellites, Hi’iaka and Namaka. The Haumea satellites
were likely captured from the debris of the collision that produced the Haumea family of KBOs.

J.J. KavelaarsArmand H. Delsemme

Comet Hyakutake

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ScienceAstronomy

Comet Hyakutake

astronomy

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Written by

Armand H. Delsemme

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History
Comet Hyakutake

Comet Hyakutake approached Earth to within about 14 million kilometres (9 million miles) in the spring
of 1996. Because it passed so close, it appeared from Earth as one of the brightest comets of the 20th
century.(more)

Comet Hyakutake, long-period comet that, because of its relatively close passage to Earth, was observed
as one the brightest comets of the 20th century. It was discovered on January 30, 1996, by the
Japanese amateur astronomer Hyakutake Yuji, using large binoculars. Visible to the naked eye in late
February of that year, it became spectacular in March, developing a long blue ion (plasma) tail that
stretched across the sky and a white dust tail that was much shorter but wider. It finally became five or
six times as bright as a first-magnitude star when it passed Earth at a mere 0.1 astronomical unit (AU; 15
million km [9.3 million miles]) on March 24–25. It faded away in early April and reached perihelion
(closest distance to the Sun) at 0.23 AU (34 million km [21 million miles]) from the Sun on May 1.

Armand H. Delsemme

Johann Elert Bode

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ScienceAstronomy

Johann Elert Bode

German astronomer

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Born:

Jan. 19, 1747, Hamburg [Germany]

Died:

Nov. 23, 1826, Berlin (aged 79)

Notable Works:

“Astronomisches Jahrbuch”

“Uranographia”

Subjects Of Study:

Bode’s law

Solar System

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Johann Elert Bode (born Jan. 19, 1747, Hamburg [Germany]—died Nov. 23, 1826, Berlin) was a German
astronomer best known for his popularization of Bode’s law, or the Titius-Bode rule,
an empirical mathematical expression for the relative mean distances between the Sun and its planets.

Bode founded in 1774 the well-known Astronomisches Jahrbuch (“Astronomic Yearbook”), 51 yearly
volumes of which he compiled and issued. He became director of the Berlin Observatory in 1786 and
withdrew from official life in 1825. Among his other publications was Uranographia (1801), a collection
of 20 star maps accompanied by a catalog of 17,240 stars and nebulae. In 1776 he propounded a theory
of the solar constitution similar to that developed in 1795 by Sir William Herschel. He gave currency to
the empirical rule known as Bode’s law, which was actually announced by Johann Daniel Titius of
Wittenberg in 1766. This law was an important factor in the discovery of the minor planets, most of
which are located between Mars and Jupiter.