Yes, Gravity Made These Space Snowmen. No, It’s Not That Simple
Key Points:
- A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that contact binaries like the Kuiper Belt asteroid Arrokoth form through gravitational collapse, a process typically linked to supernovae and black hole formation.
- Researchers used 54 simulations of pebble clouds with 100,000 particles each to model how gentle collisions during gravitational collapse can create multi-lobed objects, contrasting previous models that treated colliding bodies as fluid blobs.
- The simulations produced 29 contact binaries resembling Arrokoth, supporting the idea that such objects form through slow, non-violent processes, consistent with the relatively crater-free surfaces observed.
- Although the model aligns with observations from NASA's New Horizons mission and supports gentle formation theories, only