Centaurs are mysterious icy small-bodies that are neither purely comets nor purely inactive asteroids, but they all orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune in unstable orbits. They’re relatively understudied compared to other small body populations.
Senior Scientist Kathryn Volk and Research Scientist Jordan Steckloff of PSI, along with Maria Womack of The University of Central Florida, co-edited a newly published book that provides the first comprehensive review of the Centaur population.
“Centaurs are a very important transition population between the trans-Neptunian objects in the outer Solar System and the Jupiter family comets in the inner Solar System,” Volk said. “They are super important to understanding the transformation of cold, primordial trans-Neptunian objects into the much more physically processed Jupiter family comets.”
The most recent decadal survey highlighted the importance of Centaurs by including a Centaur orbiter and lander mission concept as a community priority.
“The next decade promises to be exciting for Centaur studies, so it was time to take stock of what we know and don’t know about them now, and think about what we should focus on,” Volk said. “Observations from JWST and Rubin Observatory’s LSST in particular will shed important new light on the population as a whole and the kind of orbital, thermal and physical evolution Centaurs experience as they make their way through the giant planet region.”
The book covers a range of topics including Centaur formation, orbital evolution, physical properties and composition, physical and thermal evolution, cometary activity, cosmochemistry, as well as the history of Centaur mission concepts and proposals.
After Volk and Womack gave talks on Centaurs at the 2020 DPS meeting, IOP Publishing approached them to edit a book on the topic for their IOP Astronomy series, published in partnership with the American Astronomical Society. They invited Steckloff to join as a co-editor. After recruiting a wide range of experts to author chapters for the book, the process of writing each chapter started with an outline from the authors. Then the editing team provided feedback to ensure that all important concepts were covered and the content flowed smoothly. A PSI-sponsored splinter meeting was held at the 2023 DPS meeting in San Antonio to gather contributing authors together to help further develop the chapters.
“As each chapter was submitted, we found suitable experts to provide peer review. We coordinated revisions and provided additional feedback. We also wrote an introductory/overview chapter and, after reading and editing all the contributed chapters, a conclusions chapter to highlight key questions we think the community can make progress on in the next decade.”
