Learning About The Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper belt is the outer asteroid belt in the cold reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of the outermost planet of the solar system, Neptune. It is also referred to as the third zone of the solar system. Scientists believe that there are millions of icy, small objects in the Kuiper belt. Other than the water ice and rock, this region also consists of frozen compounds such as methane and ammonia. 

What is the Kuiper belt?

The Kuiper belt is the outer asteroid belt in the cold reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of the outermost planet of the solar system, Neptune. The Kuiper belt consists of more than 3,500 big icy objects and more than millions of small icy bodies. However, the total mass of the outer asteroid belt is much lesser than that of earth’s. 

The Kuiper belt was discovered in 1992 when the first Kuiper object was found. 

Size and Distance of the Kuiper Belt

The outer asteroid belt is referred to as one of the largest structures in our solar system after the magnetosphere of Jupiter, the heliosphere, and the Oort cloud. The Kuiper belt is shaped like a donut. The edge of this region starts from the orbit of Neptune which is about 30 astronomical units from the Sun.

The main region of the Kuiper belt, the inner part, is about 50 AU away from the sun. The scattered disk of the Kuiper belt is the region overlapping the outer edge that continues to about 1,000 AU.

Scientists believe that there are hundreds of thousands of objects in the belt and about 2000 objects have been identified by the observers. However, the Kuiper belt is composed of the total mass of about 10% of that of Earth.

Formation and Origin of the Kuiper belt

The Kuiper belt is believed to be the leftovers from the early formation of the solar system. Just like the relation between Jupiter and the main asteroid belt of our solar system, the Kuiper belt is a region of celestial objects that came together to form Neptune. But then the gravitational pull of Neptune stirred up the small objects left.

Only a small fraction of the amount of objects is there in the Kuiper belt than it was before. A popular theory suggests that the orbits of the four planets, (Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter) could be the cause of the loss of a lot of objects in the Kuiper belt.

The theory is that when the solar system was forming, Neptune and Uranus started orbiting farther from the sun due to the change in the orbit of the planets, Saturn and Jupiter. As Neptune and Uranus begin to drift outward, the small, icy objects left from the formation of the giant planets got pulled towards the gravity  of Neptune forming the Kuiper belt.

Currently, the outer asteroid belt is eroding away slowly. The objects in the region collide occasionally and produce smaller objects.

Namesake of the Kuiper belt

The Kuiper belt region was named after the scientist, Gerard Kuiper. Gerard Kuiper published a paper on the speculation of objects beyond Pluto in 1951. Although in the 1940s, astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth also believed and published about the objects beyond pluto. Thus, the asteroid belt is also sometimes called the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. Some scientists also called the region by trans-Neptunian Region and the Kuiper objects as the trans-Neptunian objects. 

Whether it is called the Kuiper belt, the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt or the trans-Neptunian belt, the region consists of an enormous volume in the solar system and helps in understanding the early history of the solar system.

Conclusion

Let’s wrap up the article on learning about the Kuiper belt. We learned about what is the kuiper belt, kuiper objects and understood about the size and formation of this region. The Kuiper belt is the outer asteroid belt in the cold reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of the outermost planet of the solar system, Neptune. It is also referred to as the third zone of the solar system. We have also looked at the origin of the Kuiper belt.