“The Kuiper Belt: The Solar System’s Frigid Edge”
Next Open House Night in Astronomy is Thursday, March 27
After Pluto’s discovery in 1930, astronomers began wondering if this eccentric dwarf might be a member of a large population of similar objects. Sixty-two years passed before the discovery of a second body in orbit beyond Neptune, the blandly named but fascinating 1992 QB1. Another 1,000 similar objects have been found since, forming what’s come to be called the Kuiper Belt.
Keith Noll, Ph.D., principal investigator of the Hubble Heritage Project at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will lead a tour of this weird and wonderful addition to our solar system during the next Open House Night in Astronomy at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. “The Kuiper Belt: The Solar System’s Frigid Edge” takes place on Thursday, March 27, beginning with a talk by Noll at 7:30 p.m. in 101 Otto Behrend Science Building and followed by astronomical viewing from the college’s Mehalso Observatory, weather permitting. The event is free and open to the public.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Noll has studied the Kuiper Belt for the past decade. The objects within it are “a study in extremes,” he says. “Their colors vary wildly, from neutral to the reddest objects in the solar system. The densities of some objects, called ‘bubble piles,’ are so low that their interiors must be 50 percent empty space. Some rotate so rapidly that they have stretched into oddly elongated shapes, and as many as 30 percent are really pairs of objects gravitationally locked together as they orbit the Sun.”
Open House Nights in Astronomy are an outreach program of the Penn State Behrend School of Science that offer a level of presentation suitable for a non-technical audience. For more information about Keith Noll’s talk, phone the school at 814-898-6105.
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