When we talk about big advances in planetary science, we often are thinking about Mars rovers or the discovery of exoplanets. However, one area where we’ve learned a lot over the last few decades is the Kuiper belt: a region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by small bodies of ice and rock. Before 1992, Pluto was the most distant known Solar System object, but between then and now, astronomers have discovered a wealth of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs).

A new paper (coauthored by Mike Brown of Pluto-killing infamy) describes a puzzle arising from a survey of many KBOs: some of them don’t fit in with the standard model of planet formation:

A new study of large scale surveys of KBOs revealed that those with nearly circular orbits lying roughly in the same plane as the orbits of the major planets don’t fit the Nice model, while those with irregular orbits do. It’s a puzzling anomaly, one with no immediate resolution, but it hints that we need to refine our Solar System formation models. [Read more…]