[Previous] | [Session 21] | [Next]
M. E. Brown (Caltech)
The Kuiper belt was initially envisioned as a thin disk of proto-cometary bodies slowly decreasing in number beyond the edge of the known planetary system. The first insights that the Kuiper belt was more complicated were from Malhotra, who realized that the dynamical distribution of objects in the Kuiper belt preserves the signature of an early episode of planetary migration, and by Stern, who showed that the numbers, masses, and velocities of objects currently in the Kuiper belt imply that significant mass depletion and velocity evolution must have occurred in earlier times. Increasingly detailed observations and analyses of the Kuiper belt are showing increasingly complex deviations from the original simplistic view. Using a variety of techniques, I will demonstrate that the inclination distribution of the classical Kuiper belt shows two dynamically distinct populations interspersed, that the radial distribution of Kuiper belt objects shows a sharp edge beyond about 48 AU, that the colors of classical Kuiper belt objects appear correlated with inclination, and that the spectra of Kuiper belt objects show large variability. I will attempt to synthesize a coherent picture of the outer solar system from these disparate observations and answer the question of what happened in the outer solar system.