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1) asteroid belt

The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars, that is occupied by a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes but much smaller than planets, called asteroids or minor planets. This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids.

About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The total mass of the asteroid belt is approximately 18% that of the Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km).

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 FACTS ABOUT ASTEROID BELT

  • Asteroid Belt objects are made of rock and stone. Some are solid objects, while others are orbiting “rubble piles”.

  •  The Asteroid Belt contains billions and billions of asteroids.

  • Some asteroids in the Belt are quite large, but most range in size down to pebbles.

  • The asteroid 1/Ceres is also designated as a dwarf planet, the largest one in the inner solar system.

  • We know of at least 7,000 asteroids.

  • The Asteroid Belt may contain many objects, but they are spread out over a huge area of space. This has allowed spacecraft to move through this region without hitting anything.

  • Asteroids get their names from suggestions by their discoverers and are also given a number.

  •  The formation of Jupiter disrupted the formation of any worlds in the Asteroid Belt region by scattering asteroids away. This caused them to collide and break into smaller pieces.

  • Gravitational influences can move asteroids out of the Belt.

  • The Asteroid Belt is often referred to as the “Main Belt” to distinguish it from other groups of asteroids such as the Lagrangians and Centaurs.

 2)KUIPER BELT

The Kuiper belt occasionally called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt but is far larger – 20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, may have originated in the region.

 

The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not predict its existence. In 1992, minor planet (15760) Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to thousands, and more than 100,000 KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist. The Kuiper belt was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable and that comets' true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago; scattered disc objects such as Eris have extremely eccentric orbits that take them as far as 100 AU from the Sun.

 

The Kuiper belt is distinct from the theoretical Oort cloud, which is thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the Kuiper belt, and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc. Originally considered a planet, Pluto's status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to many other objects of the Kuiper belt and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as "plutinos", that share the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune.

 

The Kuiper belt and Neptune may be treated as a marker of the extent of the Solar System, alternatives being the heliopause and the distance at which the Sun's gravitational influence is matched by that of other stars (estimated to be between 50000 AU and about 2 light-years).

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FACTS ABOUT KUIPER BELT

  • The Kuiper Belt could contain hundreds of thousands of icy bodies that range in size from small chunks of ice to worlds larger than 100 kilometres across.

  • Astronomers have tracked most short-period comets from their origins in the Kuiper Belt. These are comets with orbital periods of 200 years or less.

  • There could be more than a trillion comet nuclei in the main body of the Kuiper Belt.

  • The largest Kuiper Belt Objects are Pluto, Quaoar, Makemake, Haumea, Ixion, and Varuna. These are often also referred to as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).

  • The first mission to the Kuiper Belt and beyond will fly by Pluto in July 2015. It’s called New Horizons and will survey Pluto, Charon and the other moons before heading out to study other Kuiper Belt Objects in the future.

  • Astronomers have found structures similar to our Kuiper Belt around at least nine other stars. Hubble Space Telescope imaged discs around the stars HD 138664 in the constellation Lupus and HD 53143 in the constellation Carina.

  • The ices in the Kuiper Belt date back to the formation of the solar system. They contain clues to conditions in the early solar nebula.

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