This fascinating NASA supercomputer simulation shows us how “dust ground off icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the cold-storage zone that includes Pluto and millions of other objects, creates a faint infrared disk potentially visible to alien astronomers looking for planets around the sun.” Continue reading for the video.
During the simulation, the grains were placed into one of three types of orbits found in today’s Kuiper Belt at a rate based on current ideas of how quickly dust is produced. From the resulting data, the researchers created synthetic images representing infrared views of the solar system seen from afar.
[via Phenomica]
