(ORDO NEWS) — The Kuiper belt is located far beyond Neptune and today is an unexplored region of the solar system. Its outer boundary ends abruptly, much earlier than expected.
Could Planet X or another unknown body cause this break in the Kuiper Belt?
Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
However, the Kuiper belt is about 20 times wider than the asteroid belt and has about 100 times the mass. However, there is a fundamental difference between them.
Asteroid belt asteroids are dense objects composed mostly of rock and metals, while Kuiper belt objects (which are technically not asteroids) are made up of water, ammonia, and methane ice, which are also present in large quantities on the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune.
The Kuiper belt forms a wide disk ranging from 30 astronomical units to almost 50 astronomical units, where the number of objects drops sharply.
Here are objects such as Pluto, Makemake, Haumea or Kuaar, whose diameter exceeds 1000 kilometers.
Scientists estimate that more than 10% of Kuiper belt objects have at least one satellite orbiting them.
Some are spherical, but most are tens or hundreds of kilometers in diameter and have more irregular shapes, such as Arrokoth, which was visited by the New Horizons probe a few years ago.
In addition, scientists believe that some of the satellites of the solar system’s giant planets originated in this belt and were later captured by the planets.
For example, Triton became a satellite of Neptune, and Phoebe became a satellite of Saturn. Triton would indeed have been the largest object in the Kuiper belt had it not been captured by Neptune.
The Kuiper belt was named after the famous 20th-century Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who, interestingly, was not the discoverer of the belt.
The first object discovered in this region of the solar system was Pluto in 1930. The second was its large satellite Charon in 1978. Since then, thousands of different objects have been discovered.
According to astronomers, it may contain more than a hundred thousand objects with a diameter of more than 100 kilometers.
Initially, scientists thought that the Kuiper belt could be the origin of short-period comets that take less than 200 years to complete one revolution around the Sun.
Crossing the path of the giant planets, these objects have very unstable orbits that last only a few million years.
It turns out that new comets must be constantly “created”, since those that formed near the solar system would have disappeared long ago.
However, scientists have found that the Kuiper belt is actually a fairly stable region from which it is very rare for any object to escape towards the inner solar system, and that these comets originate from a region that partially intersects with the Kuiper belt.
At about 47 astronomical units from the Sun, the Kuiper Belt breaks off abruptly, confusing astrophysicists.
It is not clear if this is the boundary of the Kuiper belt or if it is just a very wide trough, since objects can only really be detected at a distance of about 55 astronomical units from the Sun.
What is really true is the prediction of the number of objects that this region of the solar system should occupy, especially given the total mass needed for planets like Uranus and Neptune to eventually form, as well as objects in the Kuiper belt the size of Pluto.
There is a possibility that some process may have removed most of these bodies, such as the presence of a large object between Mars and Earth, which some researchers call Planet X (or Nibiru).
The theory of the existence of Planet X has been circulating in the scientific community for a long time.
Scientists have long been studying the possibility of the existence of a large planet located outside of Neptune, at a distance of tens or even hundreds of astronomical units, and now the discovery of the Kuiper dip once again suggests the existence of this mysterious object.
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