'This is quite a watershed moment in the field of planetary science,' researcher Alan Stern told Newsweek.
This belt acts as a record of the era when planets were still forming in the solar system, containing primordial material. Arrokoth, for example, has remained largely untouched—even by the sun's heat—since forming more than four billion years ago. Most of our knowledge of the Kuiper Belt comes from ground-based telescopes, meaning scientists are generally unable to study objects smaller than roughly 62 miles in diameter because they are too faint to detect.
"The most important finding is that Arrokoth has revealed a series of important clues that provided a tentative answer to how objects like it called planetesimals—the building blocks of planets—form," Alan Stern, an author on all three studies from the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, told"This is something that has been debated literally for decades in my field. And there's been no definitive test," he said.
According to Stern, all the evidence from Arrokoth points to the local cloud collapse model—a finding that has significant implications for the field of planetary science.
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