The Kuiper Belt: Home To Icy Dwarf Planets

It's far beyond the solar system. The Kuiper belt is home to a lot of Icy Dwarf Planets, maybe even trillions of Icy objects could be also found, each one spending 100s of miles bigger than New York City. It is a collection of small, icy bodies that orbit the sun farther away than Neptune. Some of the Five biggest planets in the belt are Haumea, Make Make, Quoar, Eris, and of course the one and only Pluto. Pluto is well well-known Kuiper belt object and it was one of our planets, until 2006 of August when it became a dwarf planet. The Kuiper belt is shaped as a big donut-shaped region around the orbit around Neptune. It is over 20 times wider than the main Asteroid belt and 70 times larger in mass than the Main Asteroid belt.

Formation of the Kuiper Belt.

Many of us thought that it was a blank space after the planet Neptune but there's a masterpiece but how was it formed? It is similar to the Main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is the leftover junk which is small and can’t form a planet during the formation of the solar system.

Discovery of the Belt

Humanity saw the Kuiper belt with only two spacecraft. Humanity discovered the Kuiper belt in 1983 when it sent a spacecraft of NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
It crossed the belt successfully but didn’t explore any of its worlds. It was followed by the New Horizons spacecraft designed to study Pluto and its companion Charon in 2015 after ten whole years of crossing the solar system. Charon also visited the other objects in the Kuiper belt such as the Arrokoth, which is known as the Icy snowman. NASA says ”The Kuiper Belt is truly a frontier in space — it's a place we're still just beginning to explore and our understanding is still evolving.”

But astronomers discovered it through telescopes. It was named after the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper(1905- 1973) in 1951, showing the existence of a disc-shaped region of Icy objects beyond Neptune from which comets originate.

Fun Facts

1. Did you know that the Orbit of Pluto intercepts the orbit of Neptune? But the orbit of Pluto is tilted right now and not touching the orbit of Pluto. It will tilt back to the predictions made by scientists. We humans can’t experience it as it will happen after 57 million years.

2. The orbit of Eris is way more elliptical than it is, It goes outwards almost double the size of the solar system from the solar system and comes back in.

3. Pluto takes almost 250 years and Eris takes 559 years to complete an orbit around the sun. Pluto will be closer to the Sun than Neptune again in 2227.