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Astronomy: Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt

Many planetesimals clustered to form our Sun and planets. But in two regions planetesimals remained. The wide asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is one of them. The second region is past Neptune, the Trans-Neptune Objects (TNO) region.

This second region is called the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, named after the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper. It's a vast belt of icy bodies and objects that are similar to the sizes of the biggest asteroids. It stretches from 4,5 - 7,5 billion km from the Sun, although some bodies orbit partly outside this area.

The first ice body was found in 1992 and was named 1992 QB1. Now hundreds of bodies have been discovered with a diameter of a 1000 kilometers, and an estimated 70.000 bodies are larger than 100 kilometer in diameter. Many ice bodies are binaries, two rotating ice bodies.

Four types of ice bodies

Most of these objects are located outside the orbit of Neptune inside the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, this group of bodies is called the Cubewano's.

The Plutino's are a group of bodies that have excentric orbital paths around the Sun like Pluto.

A third group is called the Scattered Disk Objects with extreme and strongly tilted orbits. Some of these bodies have a maximum distance of 30 billion kilometers from the Sun, well outside the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, but inside the Oort cloud.

A fourth group of ice bodies is called the Centaurs. These objects have excentric orbits between Saturn and Neptune

The biggest ice bodies

Name	Year of discovery	Diameter in kilometer	Orbit around the Sun in years	Tilted trajectory	Classification
Pluto	1930	2390	248	17,2^o	Plutino
Quaoar	2002	1280	286	8^o	Cubewano
Charon	1930	1190	248	17,2^o	Plutino
Ixion	2001	1065	248	19,7^o	Plutino
Varuna	2000	900	286	17,1^o	Cubewano
2002 AW197	2002	890	330	24,3^o	Scattered Disk Object

Related subjects

>> Gerard Kuiper
>> Pluto and its moon Charon
>> Quaoar (2002 LM60)
>> Neptune's moon Triton
>> Other planetesimals: the asteroid belt
>> The Oort Cloud

Artist impression of the Kuiperbelt

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