Скачать или смотреть Ultrawide binary objects in the Kuiper belt may not have come from the earliest solar system

The Kuiper Belt’s Binary Mystery Just Got Turned Inside Out 🌀🌌

For years, astronomers believed that the ultra-wide binary objects (UWBs) floating in the Kuiper Belt—the icy, distant edge of our solar system—were ancient relics from the solar system’s birth. But new research just flipped that theory on its head.

It turns out… they might not be primordial at all.

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma used new simulations to model the long-term evolution of these oddly distant binary pairs—objects that are gravitationally bound but separated by tens of thousands of kilometers. These binaries are especially common in the Kuiper Belt’s “Cold Classical” region, where objects orbit quietly and preserve clues from the early solar system.

Here’s what they found: Over 4 billion years, gravitational flybys from other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) may have slowly stretched once-tight binary systems into ultra-wide pairs. The surprising part? These interactions may have created many of today’s UWBs—rather than them having survived in that state since the solar system formed.

That means UWBs can’t reliably tell us what the early Kuiper Belt looked like. Instead of being ancient snapshots, they’re more like long-exposure photos—shaped and blurred over billions of years by subtle gravitational nudges.

Why does this matter? Because the Kuiper Belt isn’t just cosmic leftovers—it holds the keys to understanding how our solar system (and even others) formed. And if our own Kuiper Belt has evolved more dramatically than we thought, so might similar belts around distant stars—possibly hiding undiscovered planets.

The solar system’s past isn’t frozen in time—it’s still unfolding.

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