According to NASA, new observations from the New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the Kuiper Belt may be much larger than previously thought. The Kuiper Belt is a distant, vast region of the solar system that contains hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks

The Kuiper Belt is about 20 AU wide, with the inner circle being about 60 AU in diameter and the outer edge being about 100 AU in diameter. 

The continued presence of dust suggests that New Horizons is still within the Kuiper Belt, and that the Kuiper Belt is much larger than previously thought. The dust storm may indicate that there is more going on in the solar system’s outermost reaches than previously thought. 

Doner says that the idea of an extended Kuiper Belt could provide another clue to solving the mysteries of the solar system’s most distant regions.

There may simply be more to the Kuiper Belt than astronomers had realized. The continued presence of dust implies New Horizons is still within the Kuiper Belt, and that the Kuiper Belt is far more extensive than anyone knew, stretching across billions of miles farther from the sun than our maps presently estimate

The Kuiper Belt is estimated to be less than 1/25th of Earth’s mass. The largest objects in the Kuiper Belt are Pluto and Eris, with Pluto being slightly larger at a diameter of 1,477 miles

The Kuiper Belt is similar to the asteroid belt, but is 20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. Astronomers estimate there are hundreds of thousands of objects in the Kuiper Belt region that are at least 60 miles- (100 kilometers-) wide or larger

The Kuiper belt is thought to consist of planetesimals, fragments from the original protoplanetary disc around the Sun that failed to fully coalesce into planets and instead formed into smaller bodies, the largest less than 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) in diameter

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recognizes five dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. However, astronomers continue to find new dwarf planet candidates each year. Some estimates suggest that the Kuiper Belt may contain up to 200 dwarf planets, with over 10,000 in the region beyond

The Kuiper Belt is also home to other objects that astronomers generally accept as dwarf planets, including Orcus, Quaoar, and Makemake

According to NASA, new observations from the New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the Kuiper Belt may extend to 80 astronomical units (AU) or farther. Previously, the Kuiper Belt was thought to extend to about 50 AU

The Kuiper Belt is a ring of dust and debris made up of icy and rocky particles. It’s a vast, distant outer zone of our solar system, populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks. Some of the objects in the Kuiper Belt, including Pluto, are over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide. In addition to rock and water ice, objects in the Kuiper Belt also contain a variety of other frozen compounds like ammonia and methane. 

The Kuiper Belt is named after Gerard Kuiper who, in 1951, proposed that a belt of icy bodies might lay beyond Neptune. 

New observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt – the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks – might stretch much farther out than we thought

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has visited two Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs): Pluto and Arrokoth. In 2015, New Horizons flew by Pluto, sending back the first close-up images of the planet. In 2019, New Horizons flew by Arrokoth, becoming the first spacecraft to visit a classical KBO

Pluto and Eris are the largest KBOs, with diameters of around 1,430 miles and 1,444 miles, respectively. Other KBOs have diameters between 600–900 miles. 

Some KBOs are detached objects, meaning their orbits never come closer to the Sun than about 40 AU. Most other KBOs spend at least part of their orbits between 40 and 50 AU from the Sun

Space is filled with dust formed of tiny particles just microns — millionths of a meter — in size. Much of the dust in our solar system is leftover residue from the formation of the planets, which was a violent affair that saw a multitude of objects smash into one another. Today, this ancient dust is also joined by fresh dust sputtered off the surfaces of asteroids and comets by micrometeorite impacts. This dust content, both fresh and ancient, gives rise to the enigmatic “Zodiacal light.” The dust extends into the farthest reaches of the solar system. Astronomers still are not entirely sure of the make-up of this final frontier.

Beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Scattered Disk, populated by KBOs that have been scattered from the Kuiper Belt by gravitational tides coming from the solar system’s outermost planet, Neptune. Objects in the Scattered Disk tend to have highly elliptical orbits that are steeply inclined to the plane of the solar system and can go out to hundreds of AU’s from the sun. One AU, or astronomical unit, is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun.

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