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Science 7 January 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5706, pp. 71 - 75
DOI: 10.1126/science.1100553
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Review

The Kuiper Belt and the Solar System's Comet Disk

Brett Gladman

Our planetary system is embedded in a small-body disk of asteroids and comets, vestigial remnants of the original planetesimal population that formed the planets. Once formed, those planets dispersed most of the remaining small bodies. Outside of Neptune, this process has left our Kuiper belt and built the Oort cloud, as well as emplacing comets into several other identifiable structures. The orbits in these structures indicate that our outer solar system's comet disk was shaped by a variety of different physical processes, which teach us about how the giant planets formed. Recent work has shown that the scattered disk is the most likely source of short-period comets. Moreover, a growing body of evidence indicates that the sculpting of the Kuiper belt region may have involved large-scale planetary migration, the presence of other rogue planetary objects in the disk, and/or the close passage of other stars in the Sun's birth cluster.

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6K 2S5, Canada.

E-mail: gladman{at}astro.ubc.ca

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
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Parent Volatiles in Comet 9P/Tempel 1: Before and After Impact.
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Disks Around Stars and the Growth of Planetary Systems.
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From Stars to Dust: Looking into a Circumstellar Disk Through Chondritic Meteorites.
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