O Kuiper belt is the name given to a cluster of asteroids located just beyond Pluto and initially theorized by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951. This belt is located in an area of the solar system farther than the eight planets from the sun, at an estimated distance between 30 AU and 50 AU, considering that AU is the astronomical unit that equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which corresponds to 149,597,871 km.
Objects belonging to the Kuiper Belt are classified as transneptunian objects, that is, that are located beyond Neptune, the last planet in the solar system. Neptune, by the way, is largely responsible, according to current theories, for the formation of this set of asteroids, because of the influence he exerts in their orbits.
A year before Kuiper proposed the asteroid belt that encircles the solar system, German astronomer Jan Oort formulated a hypothesis that all comets would come from a region that would circle the sun at a distance 50,000 times farther from Earth, which was called
Oort Cloud. It would therefore be far beyond the Kuiper Belt. The main finding that led him to this conclusion was that no comet observed showed evidence of being from any interstellar region (other than our solar system).In the 1980s, through computer simulations, it was predicted that an actual a kind of asteroid deposit in a region beyond Neptune, thus proving the theory proposed by Kuiper. These asteroids would be formed by the remains of celestial bodies that failed to cluster around a new planet in our system.
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In 1992, finally, an object with a diameter of 240 km was discovered that was located at the distance predicted by Gerard Kuiper and that received the name 1992QB1. Thus, soon after, other bodies with similar characteristics were found in the region and, with this, the existence of the Kuiper Belt was definitively proven.
Gerard Kuiper, the astronomer responsible for discovering the asteroid region transneptunians
Currently, all short-period comets – those with an orbital period of less than 200 years – are known to originate in the Kuiper Belt, including the famous Halley comet. Interestingly, the objects that make up this set originate from areas farther away than those that are part of from the Oort Cloud, as the bodies in this cloud were somehow ejected from our system and did not fully exit from him.
The composition of the Kuiper Belt is difficult to measure, as the objects are very small and located in a region far away in the solar system, so that it is practically impossible to carry out direct observations with good precision in the images. However, spectrographic measurements indicate that asteroids are composed of ice, ammonia and even water.
Soon, the probe New Horizons, which came to orbit very close to Pluto, must obtain and send more detailed information about aspects of the Kuiper Belt. Currently, it is known that it is composed of hundreds of thousands of celestial bodies, some of them even with moons orbiting around them or with characteristics of Dwarf Planets, such as the sedna, O make make it's the haumea.
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
PENA, Rodolfo F. Alves. "Kuiper Belt"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/geografia/cinturao-kuiper.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
