Why the rainbow of colors in the Kuiper belt?
For instance, the Kuiper belt past Neptune is currently the suspected home of comets that only take a few decades or at most centuries to complete their solar orbits so-called “short-period comets.” Surprisingly, Kuiper belt objects “show a wide range of colors neutral or even slightly blue all the way to very red,” said University of Hawaii astrophysicist David Jewitt. The color of an object helps reveal details about its surface composition. It remains a mystery why Kuiper belt objects show a much wider range of color and thus surface composition than other planetoids, such as the asteroids. Some researchers had suggested volcanic activity could have led to all these colors “absurd in the context of 100-kilometer-sized (60-mile) bodies,” Jewitt said, as volcanism needs something bigger. Jewitt and his colleagues had suggested that cosmic rays could have made Kuiper belt objects redder, while impacts with rocks could have dug up more pristine matter that made them less red. Nowadays J
