What is the Kuiper Belt?
Quick Answer
The Kuiper Belt is a vast ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, home to dwarf planets such as Pluto.
The Full Story
The Kuiper Belt stretches from about 30 to 50 astronomical units from the Sun, one AU being the Earth–Sun distance. It contains countless icy objects left over from the solar system’s formation, including dwarf planets Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. The first Kuiper Belt object other than Pluto and its moon Charon was discovered in 1992. It is the source of many short-period comets. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015 and past Arrokoth, a small Kuiper Belt object shaped like a snowman, on 1 January 2019.
Key Facts
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Suggested video title for this topic:
"The icy frontier at the edge of our solar system"
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