CENTAURS: Highlights from the new book and the Next Ten Years for Centaur Research

Centaurs are an unstable, transitional population of small, icy bodies connecting the Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) to their reservoir population in the trans-Neptunian region. Due to the more extreme thermal environment of the giant-planet region relative to that of the trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), Centaurs experience rapid dynamical and physical changes, thermophysically evolving these otherwise well-preserved objects. Many of these physical changes may be seen in the surface topography, ices, and refractory composition and volatiles emitted from active Centaurs. The dawn of several new observational assets and laboratory techniques whose data will be augmented with dramatically increased computing power indicates that Centaur research is at the start of a transformational era. Here we briefly summarize some of the foundational discoveries covered in earlier chapters of the new book CENTAURS and review what is needed to make significant progress on outstanding problems. We also present and discuss eight Centaur Priority Goals for the next ten years that we put in context of the 2023 U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s decadal survey for Planetary Science and Astrobiology.