Roughly a decade from now, NASA’s robotic spacecraft New Horizons will have finished its business with Pluto and be hurtling further into the Kuiper Belt, 2.8 billion miles from Earth. This 2 billion mile wide zone of extra-solar space contains all manner of trans-Neptunian objects – cubewanos, twotinos and plutinos, as well as Pluto and Charon themselves – within a fat torus of objects circling the Sun. At about 50AU from the Sun (c. 4.65bn miles), the density of these objects drops off dramatically, the so-called Kuiper Cliff. Why this happens is a mystery, although the presence of a Planet X may be responsible for carving a path through the debris, much like Saturn’s satellites do in their orbits through the debris rings of that great planet.
In the meantime, New Horizons has already passed Jupiter, and taken some beautiful photos of the biggest planet in the Solar System. NASA solicited ideas for artistic images the craft could take on its flyby, and this one, of Europa rising above Jupiter is one of many stunning photographs taken earlier this year:
Who says scientists don’t appreciate art and beauty? Carl Sagan oftens springs to mind in this context, and one of his many memorable quotes runs as follows:
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
How true. I wonder what the Kuiper Cliff really is?
On a tangentially related note I learned today that, every second, 60 billion neutrinos pass through each and every one of us. To have an even chance of catching a single one we would have a build a sheet of lead 22 light years thick, but even so, I like to think that perhaps, once in a lifetime, a neutrino strikes one of our corporeal nuclei and expires in a burst of bright blue Cherenkov radiation.
[See NASA New Horizons press release here. Thanks to Bad Astronomy Blog for the heads-up.]
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There are some writers, artists and musicians I would love to give this treatment to (if I had time), but Toynbee is the perfect historian for a blog.