Yes, Gravity Made These Space Snowmen. No, It’s Not That Simple

Yes, Gravity Made These Space Snowmen. No, It’s Not That Simple

Gizmodo science

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

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