An artist’s conception of Mors-Somnus, a binary duo comprised of a pair of icy asteroids bound by gravity, is shown. UCF researchers recently used the James Webb Space Telescope to analyze their surface compositions for the first time. Credit: Angela Ramirez, UCFA ring of icy rocks orbiting our sun just beyond Neptune may give us a glimpse of how Neptune — and other objects in the outskirts of our solar system — were formed.
What is unique to this work is that it is possible to study the surface composition of two components of the binary pair of small-sized TNOs, which had never been done before and can have implications for how we understand the whole region beyond Neptune.De Souza Feliciano led this particular study as part of Pinilla-Alonso’s greater DiSCo-TNOs program.
Due to the similar spectroscopic behavior of Mors and Somnus and their similarities with the cold-classical group, the researchers found compositional evidence for the formation of this binary pair beyond 30 astronomical units , as is also hypothesized in the previously published literature for the region where the cold-classic TNOs are also formed.
More specifically, studying the composition of small celestial bodies such as Mors-Somnus gives us precious information about where we came from, Pinilla-Alonso says.“We are studying how the actual chemistry and physics of the TNOs reflect the distribution of molecules based on carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen in the cloud that gave birth to the planets, their moons, and the small bodies,” she says. “These molecules were also the origin of life and water on Earth.
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