Wikipedia
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The Kuiper belt or , sometimes called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a circumstellar disc in the Solar System beyond the planets, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies, or remnants from the Solar System's formation. Although many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, are also thought to have originated in the region.
The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not actually predict its existence. In 1992, was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) since Pluto. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000 KBOs over in diameter are thought to exist. The Kuiper belt was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. However, studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable, and that comets' true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago; scattered disc objects such as Eris have extremely eccentric orbits that take them as far as 100 AU from the Sun.
The Kuiper belt should not be confused with the theorized Oort cloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
Pluto is the largest and most-massive member of the Kuiper belt and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc. Originally considered a planet, Pluto's status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to many other objects of the Kuiper belt, and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as " plutinos", that share the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune.
Usage examples of "kuiper belt".
His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the Sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner Solar System.
Only a few astronomers, notably Gerard Kuiper, the Dutch-born astronomer for whom the Kuiper belt of comets is named, took any interest in the solar system at all.
Kenmuir put in what specifics he had been able to guess at, such as the broad arc of heaven in which the object most likely was wandering, but in its final form the query amounted to: Does a very large ferrous asteroid, perturbed out of the inner Solar System, orbit through the Kuiper Belt?
My plan is to remain in the Kuiper Belt for just a few more days, then return to the inner system.
The innermost province of the Oort Comet Cloud, of which these new objects may be members, is called the Kuiper Belt, after my mentor Gerard Kuiper, who first suggested that it should exist.
Short-period comets-like Halley's-arise in the Kuiper Belt, respond to gravitational tugs, sweep into the inner part of the Solar System, grow their tails, and grace our skies.
Yes, Dagny recalled, he could publicly mount a program to investigate the remote reaches of the Solar System, sketch-map and estimate-count the comets of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the Oort Cloud beyond it.
Poole's consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System.
Of course we do have a handful of human-built space probes that have reached almost as far as the Kuiper Belt.
Much later, when the cooperation faction suggested that it was too inefficient for independents to work in the near-Earth space, I moved out to the main belt, and from there to the Kuiper belt.
We take the ship out to this system's equivalent of the Kuiper belt, and we talk to a god.
This time we planned to visit every planet in the outer solar system and a few Kuiper Belt objects to boot.
We knew what was going on in the Kuiper belt, battles between Ultrabright factions, Superbright complexes going NP-slow, big energy-intensive restructuring in the Oort halo around the outer system.
So here he was at an appreciable fraction of the distance to Alpha Centauri, rounding up stragglers from the Kuiper Belt.