What is the Kuiper Belt?
The Kuiper belt, also called the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, is a disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune. It is like the asteroid belt but is far larger.
It was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to thousands.
Composition of the Kuiper Belt
It consists of small bodies and remnants from when the Solar System formed. Most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles, such as water, ammonia, and methane. The temperature of the belt is only about 50 Kelvin.
It is also known to be home to dwarf planets such as - Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake.
Due to their small size and extreme distance from the Earth, the chemical makeup of KBOs is very difficult to determine.
Being distant from the Sun, Kuiper belt objects are thought to be relatively unaffected by the processes that have shaped and altered other Solar System objects
There are also a high number of binaries - two objects close enough in mass to be orbiting each other - in the Kuiper belt. The best example is the Pluto-Charon binary.
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