Editors: Kat Volk, Maria Womack, and Jordan Steckloff
This will be the first comprehensive research reference covering the Centaurs as a population of objects critical to our understanding of the formation and evolution of icy small bodies in the solar system. Topics to be reviewed in CENTAURS include
- the current states of Centaur observations and laboratory experiments
- connections to the Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), Jupiter family comets (JFCs), and other icy body populations
- current theories on the formation of Centaurs
- constraints on Centaurs’ physical properties (shapes, composition, surface properties, etc)
- our current best understanding of volatile outgassing, outbursting, surface evolution, ring formation, and other processes that affect Centaurs as they physically evolve
- proposed in situ exploration of Centaurs
- exciting new tools, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and JWST, which could transform our understanding of the Centaurs
Centaurs will be published in 2025 by IOP as part of the IOP Astronomy series.