The Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt is a thick ecliptic band which contains over 200 million small, icy objects. These objects, known as the Kuiper Belt Objects or trans- Neptunians, were discovered in 1992 by Jewitt and Lu. The first Kuiper Belt Object discovered in 1992, is QB1 (1992) and is 150 miles wide. The Kuiper Belt is about 30 AU to 50 AU away from the Sun. The Kuiper Belt is very important because of two specific things; the first being, Kuiper Belt Objects are remnants from the earliest phases of the solar system and are tens of millions of years old and secondly, that the Kuiper Belt is the source of short-period comets.

The Kuiper Belt is named after Gerald Kuiper, an American scientist with a special interest in astronomy. He wrote a paper in 1951 that mentioned objects out beyond Pluto. He predicted that there must be a cloud of dust and debris out past the main area of the solar system, i.e. out past Pluto (Jewitt “The Kuiper Belt”). His hypothesis was reinforced in the 1980s by computer simulations.