The Hot Main Kuiper Belt Size Distribution from OSSOS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Using the absolute detection calibration and abundant detections of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey project, we provide population measurements for the main Kuiper Belt. For absolute magnitude H r < 8.3, there are 30,000 nonresonant main-belt objects, with twice as many hot-component objects than cold, and with total mass of 0.014 M ⊕ , only one-seventh of which is in the cold belt (assuming a cold-object albedo about half that of hot-component objects). We show that trans-Neptunian objects with 5.5 < H r < 8.3 (rough diameters 400–100 km) have indistinguishable absolute magnitude (size) distributions, regardless of being in the cold classical Kuiper Belt (thought to be primordial) or the “hot” population (believed to be implanted after having been formed elsewhere). We discuss how this result was not apparent in previous examinations of the size distribution due to the complications of fitting assumed power-law functional forms to the detections at differing depths. This shared size distribution is surprising in light of the common paradigm that the hot-population planetesimals formed in a higher density environment much closer to the Sun, in an environment that also (probably later) formed larger (dwarf planet and bigger) objects. If this paradigm is correct, our result implies that planetesimal formation was relatively insensitive to the local disk conditions and that the subsequent planet-building process in the hot population did not modify the shape of the planetesimal size distribution in this 50–300 km range.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".