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What Has the Kuiper Belt Taught Us About The Solar System?
Over 4 billion miles (6.7 billion km) from the Sun, the Kuiper Belt is a vast zone of frozen worlds we still know very little about. Image: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the first Kuiper Belt Object, 1992QB1. KBOs are distant and mostly tiny worlds made up of ice and rock that orbit the Sun at incredible distances, yet are still very much members of our Solar System. Since 1992 over 1,300 KBOs have been found, and with NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft speeding along to its July 2015 rendezvous with Pluto and Charon (which one could argue are technically the first KBOs ever found) and then onwards into the Belt, we will soon know much more about these far-flung denizens of deep space.
But how has the discovery of the Kuiper Belt — first proposed by Gerard Kuiper in 1930 (and in a fashion even earlier by Kenneth Edgeworth) — impacted our current understanding of the Solar System? New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute recently discussed this on his mission blog, “The PI’s Perspective.”
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Read the rest of What Has the Kuiper Belt Taught Us About The Solar System? (480 words)
© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: 1992 QB1, Alan Stern, KBO, kuiper belt, New Horizons, orbit, planets, Pluto, Solar System
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2012-08-30 11:08:03
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/97126/what-has-the-kuiper-belt-taught-us-about-the-solar-system/
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