The Kuiper Belt
The Kuiper Belt
The Kuiper Belt is a thick ecliptic band which contains over 200 million small, icy objects. These objects, known as the Kuiper Belt Objects or trans- Neptunians, were discovered in 1992 by Jewitt and Lu. The first Kuiper Belt Object discovered in 1992, is QB1 (1992) and is 150 miles wide. The Kuiper Belt is about 30 AU to 50 AU away from the Sun. The Kuiper Belt is very important because of two specific things; the first being, Kuiper Belt Objects are remnants from the earliest phases of the solar system and are tens of millions of years old and secondly, that the Kuiper Belt is the source of short-period comets.
The Kuiper Belt is named after Gerald Kuiper, an American scientist with a special interest in astronomy. He wrote a paper in 1951 that mentioned objects out beyond Pluto. He predicted that there must be a cloud of dust and debris out past the main area of the solar system, i.e. out past Pluto (Jewitt "The Kuiper Belt"). His hypothesis was reinforced in the 1980s by computer simulations. The simulations predicted that a belt of debris would naturally form around the edge of the solar system. There is some dispute as to who really predicted the Kuiper belt first. Kenneth Edgeworth wrote a paper in 1943 and then another 1949 in which he seemed to indirectly predict the belt. Kuiper did not cite any of his work. This will be a never-ending dispute (Stern 52). Gerard Kuiper was also responsible for discovering Saturn 's largest moon, Titan in 1944, Uranus 's fifth moon, Miranda, in 1948, and Neptune 's second moon, Nereid in 1949.
Classical Kuiper Belt Objects are between 37 and 59 AU from Earth. They mainly have a semi-major axis between 42 48 AU. They are categorized as classical ' because their orbits have small eccentricities that are expected of objects formed by accumulation of mass in a cool disk. Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects are defined by large, eccentric, looping inclined orbits. There distance from
The Kuiper Belt is a thick ecliptic band which contains over 200 million small, icy objects. These objects, known as the Kuiper Belt Objects or trans- Neptunians, were discovered in 1992 by Jewitt and Lu. The first Kuiper Belt Object discovered in 1992, is QB1 (1992) and is 150 miles wide. The Kuiper Belt is about 30 AU to 50 AU away from the Sun. The Kuiper Belt is very important because of two specific things; the first being, Kuiper Belt Objects are remnants from the earliest phases of the solar system and are tens of millions of years old and secondly, that the Kuiper Belt is the source of short-period comets.
The Kuiper Belt is named after Gerald Kuiper, an American scientist with a special interest in astronomy. He wrote a paper in 1951 that mentioned objects out beyond Pluto. He predicted that there must be a cloud of dust and debris out past the main area of the solar system, i.e. out past Pluto (Jewitt "The Kuiper Belt"). His hypothesis was reinforced in the 1980s by computer simulations. The simulations predicted that a belt of debris would naturally form around the edge of the solar system. There is some dispute as to who really predicted the Kuiper belt first. Kenneth Edgeworth wrote a paper in 1943 and then another 1949 in which he seemed to indirectly predict the belt. Kuiper did not cite any of his work. This will be a never-ending dispute (Stern 52). Gerard Kuiper was also responsible for discovering Saturn 's largest moon, Titan in 1944, Uranus 's fifth moon, Miranda, in 1948, and Neptune 's second moon, Nereid in 1949.
Classical Kuiper Belt Objects are between 37 and 59 AU from Earth. They mainly have a semi-major axis between 42 48 AU. They are categorized as classical ' because their orbits have small eccentricities that are expected of objects formed by accumulation of mass in a cool disk. Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects are defined by large, eccentric, looping inclined orbits. There distance from
Bibliography: 1. Jewitt, David, "Kuiper Belt." www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/kb.html (Apr.2003, read 2003-11-14,15,18,24,25,26) Part of the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii. David Jewitt is one of the two men who first discovered the Kuiper Belt Objects. 2. Stern, S. Alan. "Journey to the Farthest Planet." Scientific American. 262, 6, 50-58. (May 2002) 3. Trujillo, Chadwick A. "Discovering the Edge of the Solar System. American Scientist. 91, 5, 424 (2001) 4. Solar System Bodies: Kuiper Belt Objects http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/features/planets/kbos/kbos.html (29-Oct-2003, 29-Oct-2003) This is a NASA website. 5. "The Mission" New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds. The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission.html (2001, 2003-Oct-28) This is a link off the NASA webpage. It is the lab that is designing the spacecraft. 6. Pictures on pg 3- from Jewitt, David, "Kuiper Belt." www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/kb.html 7. Pictures on pg 4- from Jewitt, David, "Kuiper Belt." www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/kb.html