Named in honour of Gerard Kuiper, one of the first people to posit its existence, the Kuiper Belt is a belt of icy bodies confined to the plane of the Solar System extending beyond the orbit of Neptune. The Kupiter Belt was thought to be the reservoir of the short period comets. Since then, almost 1, more KBO s have been discovered, with the largest having diameters equivalent to or greater than that of Pluto. Go farther.
The Kuiper Belt is a region of space. The known icy worlds and comets in both regions are much smaller than Earth's Moon. The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped ring of icy objects around the Sun, extending just beyond the orbit of Neptune from about 30 to 55 AU.
Short-period comets which take less than years to orbit the Sun originate in the Kuiper Belt. There may be hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than km 62 miles and an estimated trillion or more comets within the Kuiper Belt.
Some dwarf planets within the Kuiper Belt have thin atmospheres that collapse when their orbit carries them farthest from the Sun. The first mission to explore the Kuiper Belt is New Horizons.
It flew past Pluto in and is on its way to explore another Kuiper Belt world. It is not clear if worlds in this distant, cold region are not capable of supporting life as we know it. Astronomers are searching for a possible planet that might explain the strange orbits of several Kuiper Belt Objects. The nickname: Planet 9. The inner, main region of the Kuiper belt ends around 50 AU from the Sun. Overlapping the outer edge of the main part of the Kuiper Belt is a second region called the scattered disk, which continues outward to nearly 1, AU, with some bodies on orbits that go even farther beyond.
Astronomers think the icy objects of the Kuiper Belt are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system. Similar to the relationship between the main asteroid belt and Jupiter, it's a region of objects that might have come together to form a planet had Neptune not been there.
Instead, Neptune's gravity stirred up this region of space so much that the small, icy objects there weren't able to coalesce into a large planet. We call it the Kuiper Belt. The region also contains several dwarf planets — round worlds too large to be considered asteroids but too small to qualify as a planet.
Pluto was the first true Kuiper Belt object KBO to be seen, although scientists at the time didn't recognize it as such until other KBOs were discovered. Once Jewitt and Luu discovered the Kuiper Belt, astronomers soon saw that the region beyond Neptune was full of icy rocks and tiny worlds. Sedna , a KBO that's about three-fourths the size of Pluto, was discovered in It is so far out from the sun it takes about 10, years to make a single orbit.
Sedna is about 1, miles 1, km wide and circles the sun in an eccentric orbit that ranges between 8 billion miles Eris orbits the sun approximately once every years, traveling almost times farther from the sun than Earth does. Its discovery revealed to some astronomers the problem of categorizing Pluto as a full-scale planet.
Pluto and Eris, surrounded by the Kuiper Belt, had clearly failed to do so. Two more dwarf planets, Haumea and Makemake , were discovered in the Kuiper Belt in Astronomers are now reconsidering Haumea's status as a dwarf planet. In , when the object passed between Earth and a bright star, scientists realized it is more elongated than round. Haumea's elongated shape could be a result of it's rapid spin; a day on the object only lasts about four hours. Planet Nine is a hypothetical world thought to orbit the sun at a distance that is about times farther from the sun than Earth's orbit, and about 20 times farther out than the orbit of Neptune.
The orbit of Neptune is 2. Scientists have not actually seen Planet Nine. Its existence was inferred by gravitational effects observed on other objects in the Kuiper Belt. The pair have spent the last six years working on the deepest survey of faint objects at the edge of the solar system, after proposing the existence of Planet X, a small dwarf planet beyond Pluto, in So far, Sheppard and Trujillo have found 62 distant objects, which make up about 80 percent of all of those at the edge of the system.
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