Ice dwarf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An ice dwarf is a planetary body that is larger than the nucleus of a normal comet and much icier than any asteroid. They are believed to be up to a few hundred kilometers across, and they are found mostly in the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt in very large numbers.
Ice dwarf is not an official IAU classification, and it overlaps with the more official cubewano and plutino classifications.
Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute believes there may be trillions of ice dwarfs beyond Neptune that we have never seen. Stern says that the three outer planets show signs of collisions with ice dwarfs, 1000 to 2000 kilometers in diameter. Uranus could have tipped off its axis by an ice dwarf, and Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, may have hit an ice dwarf as well.
[edit] List of largest ice dwarfs
- Ice dwarfs larger than 2000 km in diameter
[edit] External links
- Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy and Spaceflight (David Darling)
- Astronomers struggle to define 'planet'
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