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.
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00:00 [Music]
00:03 At the edge of our solar system lies the Kuiper Belt, an area of icy and rocky debris,
00:08 around 30 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Back in 2019, NASA's New Horizons probe
00:14 reached the edge of that zone, and now it has uncovered a bit of a surprise. The probe's data
00:19 collection indicates higher than expected dust levels in an area where the belt should be
00:23 thinning, meaning it could be much wider than we thought. The Kuiper Belt is rather poorly
00:27 understood, but this mission will hopefully change that, as it is taking the first direct
00:32 measurements of interplanetary dust far beyond Neptune and Pluto. So what's really out there?
00:36 Well, a whole lot of ice and rocks, and even dwarf planets, but hopefully more,
00:40 which the researchers running the mission say many more surprises and discoveries are expected.
00:46 Previously, astronomers believed that the Kuiper Belt extended out to around 50 astronomical units,
00:51 or around 50 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Now they say it could be 80 astronomical
00:56 units, meaning it's considerably thicker, with physicist Alex Donner saying about New Horizons'
01:02 most recent revelation, quote, "The idea that we might have detected an extended Kuiper Belt,
01:06 with a whole new population of objects colliding and producing more dust,
01:10 offers another clue in solving the mysteries of the solar system's most distant regions."