Facts about the Kuiper Belt
At its birth, the Solar System was a completely different place than what it looks like today. It would have a very horrific experience to find huge pieces of rocks floating everywhere for billions of miles. Over the time these rocks hit each other and formed bigger objects which then attracted other particles. This was the beginning of Planets and they became the worlds we know today. Our Solar System gave birth to 8 new and huge planet which are still in orbit around the Sun.
But 3 billion miles away from the Sun, behind Neptune, not much has occurred since the ancient times. There is a huge belt of rocks, ice and debris floating and orbiting our Sun, a sneak peak of how our Solar System was when everything started. This huge belt of debris is known as the Kuiper Belt (sometimes referred to as the Kuiper-Edgeworth Belt) and is an area of the outer solar system that is estimated to stretch across 20 astronomical units (AU) of space. It contains small solar system bodies made mostly of ices which are condensed methane, ammonia, nitrogen and water.
Kuiper Belt is named after Gerard Kuiper, the man who theorized about a disk of material in the outer reaches of the solar system, and Kenneth Edgeworth, who had the idea that the outer solar system contained a number of small bodies, perhaps left over from the formation of the Sun and planets.
Facts about Kuiper Belt:
1. Most of the short term Comets that we see on Earth have their origins in the Kuiper Belt.
2. Kuiper Belts can contain hundreds of thousands of ice bodies containing millions of gallons of water.
3. There can be trillions of comet nuclei in the centre of the Kuiper Belt.
4. The largest Kuiper Belt Objects are Pluto, Quaoar, Makemake, Haumea, Ixion, and Varuna. These are often also referred to as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).
5. New Horizons is the first space probe to study Pluto, its moons and the Kuiper Belt.
6. Many ices in the Kuiper Belt may date back to the birth of our Solar System and provide amazing data about the conditions in the Solar Nebula.
7. Astronomers have found similar structures like Kuiper Belt around other stars making it a very common phenomena in our universe.
