What is the Kuiper Belt?
The Kuiper belt is a region of the solar system past Neptune’s orbit. It extends from about 30 Astronomical Units (AU), or 30 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun, to around 50 AU. The Kuiper belt is home to hundreds of orbiting Kuiper belt objects, or KBOs, the best known of which is the dwarf planet Pluto. Charon, which is either a moon of Pluto or half of a double planet formation, is also a KBO. Neptune’s moon, Triton, is believed to be a former Kuiper belt object that became trapped in the planet’s orbit. Astronomers Frederick C. Leonard and Kenneth E. Edgeworth were among the first to hypothesize the existence of what would become known as the Kuiper belt, in 1930 and 1943 respectively. It was Gerard Kuiper, however, who popularized the theory. In 1951, Kuiper suggested that short period comets, those that orbit the sun in under 200 years, originated in the Kuiper belt region. The region received its current name in 1992, when the first KPO after Pluto and Charon was disc
