A peculiar peanut-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt, Arrokoth, has intrigued astronomers since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft visited it in 2019. The latest study offers a new understanding of how this ...

In A Nutshell Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped object billions of miles from Earth, is one of the oldest and least-disturbed relics of the early solar system Scientists have long debated whether its two ...

A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Planetary Scientist and Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the ...

Astronomers had decent guesses about how these peanut-shaped asteroids formed but couldn’t get the physics to work—until now.

Researchers simulated how gravitational collapse forms two-lobed contact binaries in the Kuiper Belt without destructive ...

Nothing you encounter is truly “pristine.” Nearly every atom on our planet has been processed in some way, either by humans, the Sun, Earth’s core, or other influences. But on New Year’s Day 2019, the ...

Arrokoth has a geometric albedo of p_V = 0.21_ (-0.04)^ (+0.05) at a wavelength of 550 nm and ~0.24 at 610 nm. Arrokoth’s geometric albedo is greater than the median but consistent with a distribution ...

A new study posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are similar enough to suggest a ...