"Out in the Kuiper Belt, the massive doughnut of debris beyond Neptune, about one in 10 kilometer-scale objects have surprised scientists with their unexpected shape. Rather than resembling a ball, each of these remnants from the solar system's early history is composed of two different-sized lobes, like a peanut or a lazily assembled snowman. Astronomers got their clearest view yet of the phenomenon when NASA's New Horizons mission flew by the two-lobed Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019."
"But they've steadily found additional examples of these strangely shaped planetesimalsthe technical term for the icy, rocky building blocks that assembled into our solar system's planets billions of years ago. Solving the mystery of these snowmanlike objects, researchers hope, could unlock a deeper understanding of how exactly Earth and other worlds first came to be. Now one team has an explanation, helping place another piece in the ongoing puzzle of planet formation."
About one in ten kilometer-scale Kuiper Belt objects exhibit a bilobed shape, formed of two different-sized lobes that resemble a peanut or a lazily assembled snowman. The New Horizons flyby of Arrokoth in 2019 offered the clearest view of such a two-lobed Kuiper Belt object. Additional bilobed planetesimals have been steadily identified across the Kuiper Belt. Numerical simulations created many bilobed bodies with different lobe shapes and sizes, demonstrating that gentle, direct mergers of planetesimals constitute a physically plausible formation pathway. Understanding these contact binaries can clarify how planetesimals assembled into planets in the early solar system.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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