New Superhighway System Discovered in the Solar System
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
New superhighway system discovered in the Solar System:
Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune's distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.
In their paper, published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science Advances, the researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what's known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly discovered "celestial autobahn" or "celestial highway" acts over several decades, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize Solar System dynamics.
Journal Reference:
Nataa Todorovi, Di Wu, Aaron J. Rosengren. The arches of chaos in the Solar System [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1313)
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