I just read about new WISE mission been launched to look for objects in KP and over there, and this question came to my mind: does it exist a map of kuiper belt objects? I have not so much clear how Pluto is located up there; I always imagined it just as a planet alone in its orbit, but , as far as I can understand now, there's actually something more similar to the asteroid belt among mars and jupiter; is this correct? Any picture of it?

This is from the IAU Minor Planet Center:

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/plot/Outer.gif

EDIT And here's how to navigate to that, and much else besides:

Search: IAU Minor Planets Center
(scroll down to)
Lists and Plots
tabulations and plots
*Minor Planets
(scroll down again)
Plots of the Solar System

That's the site I was going to send you to. There's a lot of good stuff there:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Animations/Animations.html

For the most part I'd call these more diagrams than maps. The job of actually mapping the Kuiper belt would be a bit like taking a census of the oceans' krill.

Some amazing examples of observer bias there. First, what a coincidence that the periapsis of all of the highly eccentric Kuiper belt objects happen to be around the last decade! Must have been some big party in the inner solar system about then. Second, what a sad coincidence that Pluto is moving into the one blank region of the Kuiper belt right about when New Horizons will be winging past.

-Kevin

Yep, a big party of new discoveries!



I believe that region is in the direction of the galactic core, which is difficult to observe.

Also, I seem to remember our current knowledge of the Kuiper Belt is very Northern-Hemisphere- and ecliptic-biased, since that's where the surveys have concentrated so far.

A side view might look similarly odd.

I found some incredible links:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/astro/tnoslist.html

Couldn't even image such plenty of objects!!!



I didn't even know that a dwarf planet BIGGER than Pluto was found FIVE years ago , and that Pluto tself has THREE moons rather than 1!!
http://epsc.wustl.edu/classwork/classwork_...21-RingsIce.pdf

I was still stuck in the "8planets+asteroids belt" model !

I'm just as excited as you are, cassioli, even after watching the discoveries unfold bit by bit. Once you've taken in the Kuiper belt don't forget to check out Sedna!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna

What planet have you been on, cassioli??

This site is not a bad place to keep up with such discoveries; also check out Mike Brown's blog and twitter feed.
http://twitter.com/plutokiller
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/
Since Mike and his students are responsible for a great many of those discoveries.

WISE should add hundreds of new objects. Doesn't matter if they are black and reflect almost no sunlight, they only have to be warm relative to solid hydrogen.

I thought that, too, but then I've been told it can only detect bodies with internal heat source, as it can't see "below" 70K. Is that true? They also say that it couldn't even detect eatrh, which is 35 K (???)

Does it exist a solar system map like this one, but which also depicts oort, kuiper, scattered and so on?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QIN9Dot7WZg/SpHH...00/IMG_9436.JPG

Not in detail, of course, just to have an idea.
It would be cool if it was big enough to be printed as a poster...

I think the heat source refers to objects outside our solar system that are not reflecting starlight, like Brown Dwarfs. Surely we should see objects like Pluto, which doesn't have a heat source but can be seen from Earth with 'normal' telescopes. I'm looking forward to the WISE results

Not sure about where you live, but it's a tad over 273 K in Wales this morning.

Coldest night of the year in the Boston area, with the wind chill it feels like 35K.

that's what I think: how can Earth be 35K? Shouldn't it be 300K???

Maybe they refer to far objects the same size of the earth..

WISE can't detect objects as cold as any of the known Kuiper belt objects. It couldn't detect another Earth if such existed within the Kuiper belt, as an Earth would only be 35 K out there. Read starting from "Moving on to the brown dwarf detections..." in my blog entry on the mission.

The papers I've seen discussing Spitzer Space Telescope observations have calculated temperatures for kuiper belt objects of above 50K, still too cold for WISE. WISE may be able to detect some centaurs out to about 15 AU, Chiron for example, was 98K at 13 AU.

cassioli, did you read Brown's whole article around that? He makes some great points about how that style depiction of the solar system isn't helpful.

And he provides his own depiction, to boot.

Full inline quote removed - ADMIN
yes, indeed I was asking for a solar system poster based on his layout. But being not able to find it, I'm going to create it by myself.

This is my "work in progress" solar system:
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/2881/sistemasolare.jpg

Any suggestion?
I'd like to add some boxes with details about minor bodies. Maybe I could add major moons of each planet.

Text will be clearly visibile in hi-res version (even smallest one).

I like the approach - it is very effective at conveying a sense of the relative scale of the various important bodies in the system.

I'd make a couple of suggestions:
Use a solar image of just a fraction of the solar limb as a backdrop, but keep it to the same scale so it is almost a vertical slice to convey just how huge the sun is and keep a solar prominence in the frame, that works very nicely IMO. I'd also prefer to see a presentation that kept the body sequence intact in terms of overlay position - I think the presentation would be better with Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake clearly positioned "behind" Saturn and the order of the inner planets showing Mercury\Venus\Earth\Mars in that sequence from foreground to background.

Also I'd broaden the spatial part of the chart that shows the absolute range from Sol out to the Kuiper belt bodies so that it covers the entire width of the image - the basic idea is excellent though as it fills in the missing impression of distance that the to-scale primary images cannot convey.

They are just opinions though - I really do like this approach, excellent work.

One final thing - if you can apply some anti-aliasing to the images it would make the full resolution version look _much_ better.

Something to think about is whether you're presenting an image of each planet that's close to what a human might see. For example, Venus looks like more of a cream-colored cue ball in the visible spectrum. You've got a simulated view of what Venus might look like without an atmosphere.

Similarly, Neptune's a bit more dusky-gray. And no one has any idea what the surfaces of Pluto, Eris, Haumea, etc look like, really. All we really have are colored dots (except for Pluto, which has a tiny map, and Haumea, which we know the shape of, roughly). Those are artists' impressions.

I think there is a whole thread about this on UMSF.

I cam't understand why my graphic program keep cuting circles in such an imprecise way: the size of each of those "pixels" is actually some dozens of pixels!!!

can anybody please suggest a goog&free graphic program to help me completing this poster?

A really (really!) good place to start would be to head over to the Planetary Society and Emily's excellent space imagery tutorials..