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Kuiper Belt Objects

The Kuiper Belt is a ring of a few hundred chunks of ice, strung like a dirty diamond necklace in the vastness of space beyond Neptune. It is located in the region about 12 to 15 billion kilometers (7.5 billion to 9.3 billion miles) from our Sun.

Kuiper Belt Objects(KBOs) are very faint, and extremely hard to study from the Earth. Even the powerful cameras of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can only produce rough images.

Most of the detected "KBOs" are small, with diameters typically around 62 mi/100 km. The first KBOs were discovered only in 1992 but its existence was hypothesized since 50 years ago.

In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed that comets came from a vast shell of icy bodies about 50,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. The region Jan Oort was refering was later called Oort cloud. A year later astronomer Gerard Kuiper suggested that some comet-like debris from the formation of the solar system should also be just beyond Neptune. This notion was reinforced by the realization that there is a separate population of comets, called the Jupiter family, that behave strikingly different than those coming from the far reaches of the Oort cloud. Besides orbiting the Sun in less than 20 years (as opposed to 200 million years for an Oort member), the comets are unique because their orbits lie near the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. In addition, all these comets go around the Sun in the same direction as the planets.

Kuiper’s hypothesis was reinforced in the early 1980s when computer simulations of the solar system’s formation predicted that a disk of debris should naturally form around the edge of the solar system. According to this scenario, planets would have agglomerated quickly in the inner region of the Sun’s primordial circumstellar disk, and gravitationally swept up residual debris. However, beyond Neptune, the last of the gas giants, there should be a debris-field of icy objects that never coalesced to form planets.

The Kuiper belt remained theory until the 1992 detection of a 150-mile wide body, called 1992QB1 at the distance of the suspected belt. Several similar-sized objects were discovered quickly confirming the Kuiper belt was real.

The most recent exciting discovery to come out of the Kuiper Belt is "Quaoar" (Kwa-whar), officially known as 2002 LM60, a frozen world orbiting our sun about a billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. The tiny world’s diameter is 1,300 km (800 miles) - about half the size of Pluto. It is the largest of the more than 500 Kuiper Belt Objects discovered in the last decade. Quaoar/2002 LM60 orbits our Sun in a near circle, more so than any of the other planets or bodies in our solar system.

NASA’s proposed New Horizons spacecraft could fly through Kuiper belt in 2026.

posted by: kyawoo at 08:56 | link | comments (3) |
space science

Comments:

#1  16 April 2005 - 21:14

 

Loved your article. I will have a post for you at my blog this week. Its bout Seeing time with the hubbel telescope.

Anonymous

#2  19 April 2005 - 14:10

 

I have seen an article on discover about how Hubble achieves this. Kyawoo, thanks for the great post - there's not enough science being spread around the blogosphere.

Anonymous

#3  25 April 2005 - 16:40

 

This is a great blog. I'm really enjoying reading your entries. It reminds me of that guy who used to have a 5 minute snippet of astronomy information on PBS - Jack Horkheimer? Star Walker?

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Anonymous

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