Researchers look at Oort cloud asteroids
Sky & Telescope reports on "A fresh look at a nagging problem—asteroids moving in comet-like orbits" where the research "concludes that asteroids must make up about 4 percent of the vast, distant Oort Cloud of comets." Four researchers wrote that the usual picture of the Oort cloud as a collection of icy comets in the outer reaches of the solar system is incomplete. "We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies in the Oort cloud should have formed within 2.5 au of the Sun, and hence be ice-free rock-iron bodies. If we assume these Oort cloud asteroids have the same size distribution as their cometary counterparts, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope should find roughly a dozen Oort cloud asteroids during ten years of operations."