Space Objects
What can a strange looking dumbbell teach scientists?
Arrokoth - discovered 2019
Arrokoth is one of the thousands of known small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt, the vast “third zone” of the solar system beyond the inner terrestrial planets and the outer gas giant planets
a billion miles beyond Pluto!
Scenes of of violent collisions come to our mind when we think of encounters between two objects in space. This was not the case in the early phases of the formation of the solar system.
A Gentle Merger
Planet Formation
How planets form
Planets form from a disc of gas and dust particles
.
Small particles merge to become larger. This leads to pebble sized, then boulder sized objects. These merges were likely gentle!
Rishi astronomers may have cognized this principle thousands of years ago!