The Kuiper Belt
It's the End of the World as we know it!
What is it?
A disk-shaped region on the edge of the solar system that contains masses of ice and icy rock, believed to be the source of comets with orbital periods of less than 200 years.
What Is The Kuiper Belt?
Solar System Rotation
This is a picture of our solar system and the rotation of Pluto and Neptune compared with the Kuiper Belt
Kuiper Belt
Animated version of the solar system and the Kuiper Belt around it
Compared Distance
Illustration of the Kuiper Belt around our solar system and it showing where Earth and the Sun are compared to it
Who?
Dutch astronomer Jan Oort first proposed in 1950 that some comets might come from the the solar system’s far suburbs. That reservoir later became known as the Oort cloud. Earlier, in 1943, astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth had suggests comets and larger bodies might exist beyond Neptune. In 1951, astronomer Gerard Kuiper predicted the existence of a belt of icy objects that now bears his name. Some astronomers refer to it as the Edgeworth-Kupier Belt.
How it Started
“It was a faint moving dot,” Jewitt says. “Then, six months later, we found a second one, then four more, then ten more, then many tens. We had broken a barrier: after finding the first one, finding others was easy and more than 1,300 are now known.”
Distance
The Kuiper belt is an elliptical plane in space spanning from 30 to 50 times Earth's distance from the sun, or 2.5 to 4.5 billion miles (4.5 to 7.4 billion kilometers).
Kuiper Belt Objects
Pluto was the first true Kuiper Belt Object to be seen.The existence of the Belt wasn't realized until scientists discovered a slow moving, small world in the outer solar system in 1992.
Objects from Kuiper Belt
These are some of the many objects found in the Kuiper Belt. Some are just as big as Pluto, our smallest planet in the solar system.