2003 EL61, News ... Options

[SigurRosFan]

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Mike Brown ... and his team discovered that five small Kuiper belt objects were travelling in similar orbits to 2003 EL61, the third-largest KBO ever found. The discovery hinted that the five pieces are fragments that split off after an ancient collision.
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- Icy chips off the old asteroid block

[hendric]

In related news, from Distant EKOs:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/ekonews/issues...html/index.html

Transneptunian Object 2003 UB313 as a Source of Comets

A.S. Guliev1

1 Shemakha Astrophysical Observatory, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Shemakha, 373243, Azerbaijan

The possibility of interrelation between long-period comets and 2003 UB313, a recently discovered large Kuiper Belt body, is investigated. For this purpose, 78 objects crossing the plane of motion of this body at distances from 37.8 to 97.6 AU have been selected from 860 long-period comets. The overpopulation of comets with this characteristic is also considered. The plane of motion of 2003 UB313 is compared with the orbital planes of other objects in number of comet crossings in the specified distance interval or in some parts of it. A statistically significant overpopulation of elliptic and intermediate comets with the corresponding orbital nodes has been established. Recently discovered and absolutely faint comets show the best effect in this sense. The same is also true for comets with osculating eccentricities e < 1. A similar result is also obtained for comets with ``original'' a1 > 0.010000. It is hypothesized that the 2003 UB313 family is present among the 78 comets. Four of them have aphelion distances from 37.8 to 97.6 AU. An ellipticity is traceable in the distribution of some of the 78 distant nodes. This may be considered as a further argument for the suggested hypothesis. Generally, the body 2003 UB313 may be assumed to play a prominent role in injecting observable comets from the transneptunian region.

Published in: Solar System Research, 41, 46 (2007 February)

[Astronomicheskii Vestnik, 41, 51]