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Looking closely at the evolution of an ultrawide (in separation) binary object, researchers included more physics that reveals much about their architecture and unfolding. They found that these ultrawide binaries may not have been formed in the primordial solar system as has been thought. Their work has been published in Nature Astronomy .
"In the outer reaches of the solar system, there exists a population of binary systems so widely separated that it seemed worth looking into whether or not they could even survive 4 billion years without being [completely] separated somehow," said Hunter M. Campbell of the University of Oklahoma in the US.
The Kuiper belt is the torus-shaped region of the solar system containing planetesimals and smaller bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. It begins at about the orbit of Neptune, which averages 30 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun, and extends to about 55 AU, inclined within 10° of the Earth's ecliptic plane.
More massive than the asteroid belt by 20 to 200 times, it consists of small remnants of the solar system's formation—most are icy volatiles made up of molecules such as methane, ammonia and water. Within it lies the dwarf planets Pluto, Eris, Orcus and more. It's thought that there exist more than 100,000 Kuiper belt objects over 100 km in diameter.
"Many works in the past have examined binary evolution as driven by collisions with passing bodies," said Campbell. "Our work examines evolution driven by gravitational perturbations."
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