22 Facts About Kuiper belt

Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units to approximately 50 AU from the Sun.

The Kuiper belt is home to most of the objects that astronomers generally accept as dwarf planets: Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar, and Makemake.

Kuiper belt was named after Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, although he did not predict its existence.

Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the Kuiper 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.

Kuiper belt is distinct from the hypothesized Oort cloud, which is believed to be a thousand times more distant and mostly spherical.

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Originally considered a planet, Pluto's status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

The number and variety of prior speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it.

In 1951, in a paper in Astrophysics: A Topical Symposium, Gerard Kuiper speculated on a similar disc having formed early in the Solar System's evolution, but he did not think that such a belt still existed today.

Kuiper belt was operating on the assumption, common in his time, that Pluto was the size of Earth and had therefore scattered these bodies out toward the Oort cloud or out of the Solar System.

In 1964, Fred Whipple, who popularised the famous "dirty snowball" hypothesis for cometary structure, thought that a "comet Kuiper belt" might be massive enough to cause the purported discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus that had sparked the search for Planet X, or, at the very least, massive enough to affect the orbits of known comets.

Kuiper belt used a blink comparator, the same device that had allowed Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto nearly 50 years before.

Studies conducted since the trans-Neptunian region was first charted have shown that the region now called the Kuiper belt is not the point of origin of short-period comets, but that they instead derive from a linked population called the scattered disc.

Brian G Marsden claims that neither deserves true credit: "Neither Edgeworth nor Kuiper wrote about anything remotely like what we are now seeing, but Fred Whipple did".

The main body of the Kuiper belt is generally accepted to extend from the 2:3 mean-motion resonance at 39.

The Kuiper belt is quite thick, with the main concentration extending as much as ten degrees outside the ecliptic plane and a more diffuse distribution of objects extending several times farther.

Classical Kuiper belt appears to be a composite of two separate populations.

The objects deposited in the cold Kuiper belt include some loosely bound 'blue' binaries originating from closer than the cold Kuiper belt's current location.

Analysis indicates that Kuiper belt objects are composed of a mixture of rock and a variety of ices such as water, methane, and ammonia.

The temperature of the Kuiper belt is only about 50 K, so many compounds that would be gaseous closer to the Sun remain solid.

Centaurs, which are not normally considered part of the Kuiper belt, are thought to be scattered objects, the only difference being that they were scattered inward, rather than outward.

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern has informally suggested missions that would flyby the planets Uranus or Neptune before visiting new KBO targets, thus furthering the exploration of the Kuiper belt while visiting these ice giant planets for the first time since the Voyager 2 flybys in the 1980s.

The left image is a "top view" of a wide Kuiper belt, and the right image is an "edge view" of a narrow Kuiper belt.