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Updated: Dec 28, 2025

Scattering And Absorption of Light in Planetary Regoliths
Published on: July 1, 2019
The solar nebula origin of (486958) Arrokoth, a primordial contact binary in the Kuiper Belt
W B McKinnon1, D C Richardson2, J C Marohnic2
1Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA. mckinnon@wustl.edu.
Abstract:
The New Horizons spacecraft's encounter with the cold classical Kuiper Belt object (486958) Arrokoth (provisional designation 2014 MU69) revealed a contact-binary planetesimal. We investigated how Arrokoth formed and found that it is the product of a gentle, low-speed merger in the early Solar System. Its two lenticular lobes suggest low-velocity accumulation of numerous smaller planetesimals within a gravitationally collapsing cloud of solid particles. The geometric alignment of the lobes indicates that they were a co-orbiting binary that experienced angular momentum loss and subsequent merger, possibly because of dynamical friction and collisions within the cloud or later gas drag. Arrokoth's contact-binary shape was preserved by the benign dynamical and collisional environment of the cold classical Kuiper Belt and therefore informs the accretion processes that operated in the early Solar System.
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