A ring of icy rocks orbiting our sun just beyond Neptune may give us a glimpse of how Neptune \u2014 and other objects in the outskirts of our solar system \u2014 were formed.<\/p>\n
Mors-Somnus, a binary duo comprised of a pair of icy asteroids bound by gravity, was recently concluded to have originated within the Kuiper Belt, meaning it can serve as a basis to study and enrich our understanding of the dynamical history of Neptune and celestial bodies known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).<\/p>\n
The promising study, published recently in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/a>,<\/em> marks the first time this has been achieved and serves as a significant landmark for the UCF-led Discovering the Surface Compositions of Trans-Neptunian Objects program \u2014 or DiSCo-TNOs \u2014 which is part of the first cycle of the James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s (JWST) many programs focused on analyzing our solar system.<\/p>\n Ana Carolina de Souza Feliciano and Noem\u00ed Pinilla-Alonso<\/a>, a postdoctoral fellow and professor in planetary science at UCF\u2019s Florida Space Institute<\/a> respectively, are co-authors of the study and part of the DiSCo team that studies unique spectral properties of small celestial bodies beyond Neptune within the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n What is unique to this work is that it is possible to study the surface composition of two components of the binary pair of small-sized TNOs, which had never been done before and can have implications for how we understand the whole region beyond Neptune.<\/p>\n