Outer Solar System More Populated than We Thought (IMAGE)

National Institutes of Natural Sciences

Outer Solar System More Populated than We Thought

Caption

Distance distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects discovered by HSC on the Subaru Telescope. The horizontal axis represents the distance from the Sun to the objects, measured in astronomical units (au; 1 au is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). The vertical axis represents the number of objects. Notice the drop in the number of objects between approximately 55 au and 70 au. Such a gap had not been reported in other observations.

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Credit: Wesley Fraser

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