What Did the NASA New Horizon Probe Find in the Kuiper Belt?

Amaze Lab

At the edge of our Solar System lies the Kuiper Belt, an area of icy bits of debris around 30 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Back in 2019 NASA’s New Horizons probe reached the edge of that zone, but now it’s past Neptune and Pluto and has made a wil new discovery.

Transcript

00:00At the edge of our solar system lies the Kuiper Belt, an area of icy and rocky debris around 30

00:09times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Back in 2019, NASA's New Horizons probe reached the

00:15edge of that zone, and now it has uncovered a bit of a surprise. The probe's data collection

00:19indicates higher than expected dust levels in an area where the belt should be thinning,

00:24meaning it could be much wider than we thought. The Kuiper Belt is rather poorly understood,

00:28but this mission will hopefully change that, as it is taking the first direct measurements of

00:32interplanetary dust far beyond Neptune and Pluto. So what's really out there? Well, a whole lot of

00:37ice and rocks, and even dwarf planets, but hopefully more, which the researchers running the mission

00:42say many more surprises and discoveries are expected. Previously, astronomers believed that

00:47the Kuiper Belt extended out to around 50 astronomical units, or around 50 times the

00:52distance of the Earth to the Sun. Now they say it could be 80 astronomical units, meaning it's

00:58considerably thicker. With physicist Alex Donner saying about New Horizons' most recent

01:02revelation, quote, the idea that we might have detected an extended Kuiper Belt, with a whole

01:07new population of objects colliding and producing more dust, offers another clue in solving the

01:12mysteries of the solar system's most distant regions.

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