A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Planetary Scientist and Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the ...

Research adds weight to theory Arrokoth’s two lobes produced by gravitational collapse – and reveals process ...

On a frigid orbit beyond Neptune, some of the solar system’s smallest worlds project a strange silhouette. Two rounded lobes, pressed together with a narrow “neck,” like a snowman that never melted.

Astronomers had decent guesses about how these peanut-shaped asteroids formed but couldn’t get the physics to work—until now.

In A Nutshell Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped object billions of miles from Earth, is one of the oldest and least-disturbed relics of the early solar system Scientists have long debated whether its two ...

Arrokoth has a geometric albedo of p_V = 0.21_ (-0.04)^ (+0.05) at a wavelength of 550 nm and ~0.24 at 610 nm. Arrokoth’s geometric albedo is greater than the median but consistent with a distribution ...

This time last year, the New Horizons mission visited the furthest object humanity has ever reached — Arrokoth, beyond the orbit of Pluto in an area called the Kuiper Belt. Now, scientists have ...

Arrokoth is far less controversial, no less meaningful, and importantly, still sounds pretty cool. The object was discovered in 2014 in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, and given the provisional ...

A new study posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are similar enough to suggest a ...