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Summary: Davies et al.: Early Ideas Concerning the Transneptunian Region 11
11
The Early Development of Ideas Concerning the
Transneptunian Region
John K. Davies
UK Astronomy Technology Centre
John McFarland and Mark E. Bailey
Armagh Observatory
Brian G. Marsden
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Wing-Huen Ip
National Central University, Taiwan
We review the history of the prediction of, and searches for, a population of comets and
transneptunian planetesimals. Starting with initial speculations before and after the discovery
of Pluto, we examine various predictions by Edgeworth, Kuiper, and others on the existence of
such a population and review the increasingly sophisticated theoretical efforts that eventually
showed that the number of short-period comets requires that an ecliptic transneptunian popu-
lation exists. We then recount various search programs that culminated in the discovery of the
first few transneptunian objects and led to the realization that this region is dynamically much
more complicated than first suspected and has important links both to Centaurs and the dense
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