The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System. It extends from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System’s moons, such as Neptune’s Triton and Saturn’s Phoebe, may have originated in the region.
About Kuiper belt in brief
The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System. It extends from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System’s moons, such as Neptune’s Triton and Saturn’s Phoebe, may have originated in the region. In 1992, minor planet Albion was discovered, the first Kui per belt object since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to thousands. More than 100,000 KBOs over 100 km in diameter are thought to exist. The region was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable and that comets’ true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4. 5 billion years ago. Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the KuiPer belt, and the second-most-massive known TNO. Originally considered a planet, Pluto’s status as part of the belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. The objects within the belt, together with any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects. The belt is distinct from the theoretical OortCloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical.
It was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard KUIper, though he did not predict its existence. In 1951, in a paper in Astrophysics: A Topical Symposium, Gerard KuiPER speculated on a similar disc having formed in the early Solar System, and therefore that Pluto was on the size of the Oort Cloud. He did not think that such a belt still existed today, but in his time, it was common for the inner planets to have scattered bodies out toward Earth and therefore out toward the inner solar system. In 1930, astronomer Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto may be one of many long-period planetary objects yet to be discovered. In 1943, in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Kenneth Edgeworth hypothesized that the material within the primordial solar nebula was too widely spaced into planets, and so rather condensed into a myriad of smaller bodies. He concluded that this region of the solar system, beyond the planets, is occupied by a very large number of comparatively small bodies and that, from time to time, their orbits condense into a number of relatively small bodies that, in their own time, become a comet and a planet. The number and variety of prior speculations have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it. It was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found.
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This page is based on the article Kuiper belt published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
