Our solar system map may need an update — the Kuiper belt could be way bigger

[Admin]

How a cosmic dust storm is helping New Horizons to redraw the map of the outer solar system.

Our solar system map may need an update — the Kuiper belt could be way bigger : Read more

 

[skynr13]

In reference to the SDC that is mounted on the leading face of the New Horizons spacecraft. How do we know that the particles striking it are made of dust and not some particles of ice from the Oort cloud?

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

The trend is there but so far it isn't very significant above expectations.

In reference to the SDC that is mounted on the leading face of the New Horizons spacecraft. How do we know that the particles striking it are made of dust and not some particles of ice from the Oort cloud?

Very astute! The paper figure 3 show one model for the interplanetary dust particles (IDP) and one model for the interstellar dust (ISD) as well as the combination:

Figure 3. SDC flux estimates for particles with a radius greater than 0.63 μm from 1 to 55 heliocentric au. Each point, with 1σ error bars, is an average of the fluxmeasured by each detector across each 3 au traversed by the New Horizons spacecraft. The orange curve represents the ISD flux values calibrated from Ulyssesmeasurements (Bernardoni et al. 2022). While ISD grains are much smaller (∼0.28 μm), they are also traveling at higher relative velocities and, as a result, SDCinterprets them as small IDPs (Bernardoni et al. 2022). The red line shows a model from Poppe (2016) that is normalized to the SDC measurements and assumes SDCis impacted only by IDPs. The black line is a sum of the orange and red models to provide a more representative model of the total flux that SDC is measuring upto 42 au.