The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have teamed up to target some of the smallest, most distant objects in the solar system, discovering that the history of these tiny objects is more puzzling than we'd realized.
The two orbiting observatories collectively discovered 27 new Trans-Neptunian Objects, or TNOs, all less than 25 miles (40 kilometers) across, with the smallest being only 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter. As their name suggests, TNOs orbit the sun from far beyond Neptune. Some of them were born out there, at the dawn of the solar system, as small planetesimals unable to take the extra step to form planets.
Models of how these TNOs formed predicted that they should have been peppered with impacts that mixed up their surface material so that their composition,...
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