Don Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC June 14, 1995

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Tammy Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5566)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 95-88

HUBBLE DETECTS LONG-SOUGHT COMET POPULATION BEYOND

NEPTUNE

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a long-

sought population of comets dwelling at the icy fringe of
the solar system. The observation, which is the
astronomical equivalent to finding the proverbial needle-in-
a-haystack, bolsters proof for a primordial comet reservoir
just beyond Neptune, currently the farthest planet from the Sun.

Based on the Hubble observations, astronomers

estimate the belt contains at least 200 million comets that
have remained essentially unchanged since the birth of the
solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The region is thought
to be the source of the comet that struck Jupiter in July 1994.

"For the first time, we have a direct handle on the

population of comets in this outer region. We now know,
conclusively, that our solar system doesn't end at Neptune.
The solar system just got a lot more interesting," says
Anita Cochran of the University of Texas, Austin. "We now
know where these short-period comets formed, and we now have
a context for their role in the solar system's evolution."

The existence of a comet-belt encircling our solar

system -- like the rings that wrap around Saturn -- was
first hypothesized more than 40 years ago by astronomer
Gerard Kuiper. The so-named Kuiper Belt remained theory and
conjecture until 1992, when ground-based telescopes began
detecting about 20 large icy objects ranging from 60 to 200
miles in diameter. However, researchers had to wait for
Hubble's high spatial resolution and sensitivity before they
could search for an underlying population of much smaller
bodies assumed to be present -- just as there are more
pebbles than boulders on the beach. The planet Pluto is
considered by astronomers to be the largest member of the
Kuiper Belt region.

"This is a striking example of what Hubble can do

well," says Cochran. "We can at last identify small comet-
sized objects that are just a few miles across, about the
size of New York's Manhattan Island." Cochran will discuss
her team's findings at a 9:30 a.m. news conference June 14,
at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in
Pittsburgh, PA.

The team believes this apparently closes the mystery

of the source of the short period comets that orbit the Sun
in less than 200 years, including such members as comet
Encke, Giacobini-Zinner, and the infamous comet Shoemaker-
Levy 9 that collided with the planet Jupiter in July 1994.
The comet-disk lies just beyond Neptune and might stretch
500 times farther from the Sun than Earth. This is 100
times closer to Earth than the hypothesized Oort cloud,
commonly thought to be a vast repository of comets that was
tossed out of the early solar system. Despite the close
proximity of the Kuiper belt comets, experts say they don't
pose any greater threat to colliding with Earth than comets
that come from much farther out.

"The Kuiper Belt is the best laboratory in the

solar system for studying how planets formed," says co-
investigator Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute's
Boulder, CO, office. "We believe we are seeing a region of
the solar system where the accumulation of planets fizzled
out."

The icy nuclei are too far away to have the

characteristic shell (coma) and tail of gases and dust that
are a comet's trademarks, when it swings close enough to the
Sun to warm up and sublimate. Detecting these bodies in
their "deep-freeze" state, at the dim horizon of the solar
system, pushed Hubble Space Telescope to its performance
limits. "Imagine trying to see something the size of a
mountain, draped in black velvet, located four billion miles
away," says co-investigator Alan Stern, also of the
Southwest Research Institute's Boulder office.

The team, consisting of Cochran, Levison, Stern and

Martin Ducan of Queen's University, Ontario, Canada, used
Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to observe a
selected region of the sky, in the constellation Taurus, that
had few faint stars and galaxies that would confuse the search.

The team plans to continue searching for more

objects. They have already collected more images with
Hubble that allow them to better quantify the number and
sizes of comets in the Kuiper belt.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by

the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy,
Inc. (AURA) for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is
a project of international cooperation between NASA and the
European Space Agency (ESA).

EDITOR'S NOTE: Media representatives who want a copy of

this image can contact the Space Telescope Science Institute
at 410/338-4562. Image files in GIF and JPEG format may be
accessed on Internet via anonymous ftp from

ftp.stsci.edu: GIF /pubinfo/gif/KBComet

JPEG /pubinfo/jpeg/KBComet

The same images are available via World Wide Web from URL
http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Latest.html, or via links in
http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html.

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