Study: Kuiper Belt's Ultrawide Binaries May Be Newer Than Thought
New research suggests that ultrawide binary objects in the Kuiper belt may not have originated in the primordial solar system as previously thought. Instead, these binaries could have evolved from initially tighter pairs that were gradually separated by gravitational perturbations over billions of years. This challenges the assumption that ultrawide binaries can be used to infer the early conditions of the solar system, as their current configuration may not be primordial.