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The Kuiper belt is distinct from the hypothesized Oort cloud, which is believed to be a thousand times more distant and mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). [21]
Solar System belts are asteroid and comet belts that orbit the Sun in the Solar System in interplanetary space. [1] [2] The Solar System belts' size and placement are mostly a result of the Solar System having four giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune far from the sun. The giant planets must be in the correct place, not too close ...
The resultant expulsion of objects from the proto-Kuiper belt could also explain the Late Heavy Bombardment 600 million years after the Solar System's formation and the origin of the Jupiter trojans. [172] It is possible that Pluto had a near-circular orbit about 33 AU from the Sun before Neptune's migration perturbed it into a resonant capture ...
Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies the area of the "trans-Neptunian region", with the doughnut-shaped Kuiper belt, home of Pluto and several other dwarf planets, and an overlapping disc of scattered objects, which is tilted toward the plane of the Solar System and reaches much further out than the Kuiper belt.
Gerard Peter Kuiper (/ ˈ k aɪ p ər / KY-pər; born Gerrit Pieter Kuiper, Dutch: [ˈɣɛrɪt ˈpitər ˈkœypər]; 7 December 1905 – 23 December 1973) was a Dutch-American astronomer, planetary scientist, selenographer, author and professor. The Kuiper belt is named after him. Kuiper is considered by many to be the father of modern ...
The Kuiper belt is a relatively thick torus (or "doughnut") of space, extending from about 30 to 50 AU [18] comprising two main populations of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs): the classical Kuiper-belt objects (or "cubewanos"), which lie in orbits untouched by Neptune, and the resonant Kuiper-belt objects, those which Neptune has locked into a ...
(307261) 2002 MS 4 (provisional designation 2002 MS 4) is a large trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt, which is a region of icy planetesimals beyond Neptune.It was discovered on 18 June 2002 by Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown during their search for bright, Pluto-sized Kuiper belt objects at Palomar Observatory.
Since the year 2000, a number of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) with diameters of between 500 and 1500 km (more than half that of Pluto) have been discovered. 50000 Quaoar, a classical KBO discovered in 2002, is over 1000 km across. Makemake and Haumea, both announced on 29 July 2005, are larger still.