The Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt

For over two centuries, scientists from all over the world have wondered whether our solar system was larger than we had originally notionned. There was Nemesis, the sun's dark twin; there was Vulcan, Mercury's moon; and there was even Earth's second moon. None of which was ever discovered, however most of them were proved to be false after careful re-examination. Then there was the infamous Planet X, the theoretical tenth planet of the solar system. It was the grand search for this planet that lead to the discovery of a completely unexpected spacial body--the Kuiper Belt.

In 1992, during a five-year telescopic survey, Jane X. Luu and David C. Jewitt sighted a small celestial body--only a few hundred kilometers in diameter. Using an electronic detector (a charge-coupled device; CCD) attached to one of the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter telesopes, noticed one faint "star" that appeared to move slightly between successive frames, indicating that the object was traveling well beyond Pluto. Christened "1992 QB1," the object refected light that was quite rich in hues, matching a dark, carbon-rich material on its surface. A second body was discovered in March 1993, confirming observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Since that time, nearly three dozen of such objects have been identified, circling through the outer Solar System. They named the region the Kuiper Belt, after Gerald P. Kuiper, a Dutch-American astronomer who, in 1951, claimed the idea that the solar system contained an outer ring of such bodies. He envisioned a belt beyond Neptune and Pluto, made up of material left over from the formation of the planets. The density of planets was so low that large planets could not have formed there.

1992 QB1

The celestial bodies travel in orbits that are slightly tilted from the ecliptic, and range from 100 to 400 kilometers in diameter. Some even consider Pluto (2,300 kilometers wide) and its moon, Charon to be Kuiper Belt object, having been dislodged from the belt by gravitational forces. Computer simulations have shown that the Kuiper Belt seems to be a good candidate for a cometary storehouse. Neptune's gravity can cause the inner edge of the Belt to erode, with the "new" comets shooting into the inner solar system, either suddenly striking a planet (especially Jupiter), or caught in a gravitational slingshot that ejects them far into space. It is estimated that there are at least, 70,000 of these trans-Neptunians.

A List of Kuiper Belt Objects