# Tag Info

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The Hill sphere radius of Pluto is about $r$ = 6 million km. Most of the Kuiper belt is in prograde motion around the Sun (like Pluto). Pluto's average speed is under a lazy 5 km/s for an orbital period of about 248 years. If the difference in orbital speed between Pluto and an average KBO is just 1 km/s, then Pluto will "sweep out" \$\pi r^2 *86,...

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"Moons" is a misnomer here, the majority of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) with companions are binaries. Now there are several populations in the Kuiper Belt, characterized by their eccentricities and inclinations. The cold classicals are hereby the most important ones, having mostly circular, low inclination orbits and a high binarity fraction of ...

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The 3713011 object (that is the internal SPICE/SPK id) is a special trajectory computed by the New Horizons team at SwRI which included data which is not in the public domain. The other one for (486958) 2014 MU69 (its official asteroid number and temporary discovery designation) is for the publicly available data. Generating an ephemeris in HORIZONS for the ...

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Virtually all KBO searches use mosaic CCD cameras operating in the visible part of the spectrum, usually with a red filter like SDSS-r' (centered at approx. 622nm SDSS filters) on big (~4m telescopes). This is what we did with the OSSOS survey I was (lightly) involved with (http://www.ossos-survey.org/about.html). Although cold KBOs are brightest in the ...

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No special techniques are required that I am aware of, but several observations must be taken to make a reasonable estimate of the orbit. Once a sufficient number of observations are made so that the orbital elements can be determined, then anything that has an elliptical orbit (eccentricity >0 but >1) can be assumed to be orbiting as part of the solar ...

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