What is the Kuiper Belt?

The Kuiper Belt is a dense, disc-shaped region of the solar system near the ecliptic plane of Neptune's orbit (about 30 astronomical units from the sun). The Kuiper Belt hypothesis was originally proposed by Irish astronomer Aegworth, and Gerald Kuiper (GPK) perfected this view.

Kuiper belt

Full name is Edgeworth-Kuiper belt (English: Edgeworth-Kuiper belt; EKB, generally referred to as the Kuiper belt, or translated

Gerald

With the most complete range, including the area farthest from the center, the Kuiper Belt extends from approximately 30 astronomical units to 55 astronomical units. However, it is generally considered that the main part (see below) is only extended from the 2: 3 resonance area of 39.5 astronomical units to the 1: 2 resonance area of 48 astronomical units. The Kuiper belt is very thin, mainly concentrated in

1950, Dutch astronomer

As mentioned earlier, newly discovered

Scientists have previously known that planetary orbits can drift, especially

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest Kuiper belt object that So far can see in the visible light band. The Kuiper Belt is a giant ring of ice debris that lies outside the orbit of Neptune and surrounds the outer edges of the solar system.

Hubble discovered this tiny piece of celestial body that is only 3,200 feet wide, and is located in a distant sky 4.2 billion miles away. The smallest Kuiper Belt object (KBO) previously discovered using reflected light is about 30 miles in diameter, which is 50 times the former.

This is the first observational evidence found in the Kuiper Belt, indicating the existence of a population of comet-scale celestial bodies that are shaped by collisions. Therefore, the Kuiper belt evolved through the collision process, which means that the water ice composition of the region has changed in the past 45 million years.

The object detected by Hubble is very dark-Class 35, which is 100 times darker than the darkest brightness that Hubble can directly see.

So how did the space telescope reveal such a small celestial body?

In an article in an issue of Nature, Hilke Schlichting and her colleagues from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena reported that the signs of Little Wandering Planet were not From direct imaging, but from Hubble's pointing data.

The Hubble Telescope has three optical instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS). FGS can observe selected guide stars for positioning and provide high-precision navigation information for the space telescope's attitude control system. In order to precisely measure the position of the star, the sensor uses the wave nature of light.

Schlichting and colleagues determined that FGS instruments are excellent, and they can detect the effects of passing through small objects in front of stars. Because the light from the background guide star is bent by the KBO passing through it, this phenomenon will cause a brief occultation and diffraction signal in the FGS data.

They selected FGS data for four and a half years for analysis. During this period, Hubble spent a total of 12,000 hours observing the celestial area within 20 degrees from the solar ecliptic plane, where most KBOs should be located. In total, the team analyzed FGS observations of 50,000 guide stars.

When Schlichting and her team analyzed the data, they discovered a separate occultation event lasting 0.3 seconds. The reason could only be that the sample starlight of the FGS instrument changes 40 times per second. The length of the occultation is very short, which is largely caused by the orbital movement of the earth around the sun.

They assumed that the KBO's orbit was circular and the angle of inclination relative to the ecliptic was 14 degrees. The KBO distance is estimated based on the length of the eclipse, and the degree of brightness dimming is used to calculate the scale of the celestial body. "I'm very intoxicated by finding this in the data," Lichtin said.

Hubble's observations of neighboring stars suggest that many of them have orbits of ice-like debris resembling the Kuiper Belt. The disk is a remnant of planet formation. According to estimates, in the billions of years, debris will collide with each other, crushing KBO-type celestial bodies to smaller, this is no longer the celestial group of primitive Kuiper belt.

The findings strongly demonstrate the possibility of significant new findings based on Hubble archived data. In a work revealing other small KBOs, the team plans to analyze FGS data remaining for almost all of Hubble's working time since launch in 1990.

The Hubble Space Telescope is an international cooperation project between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute manages Hubble's research operations. The Institute is managed by NASA for the University of Washington's Joint Organization for Astronomy Research, and it is also a co-author of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy program. ^[3]