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Article: Frontier at the edge: the Kuiper Belt.(belt of material left over from planetary formation)
- Article from:
- The Evening Standard (London, England)
- Article date:
- April 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Carus Publishing Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For almost all of the 20th century, astronomy textbooks taught us that the solar system ends at Pluto. Recently, however, astronomers have discovered that this is not the case. Instead, a vast belt of comets and miniature planets resides in and beyond the region where Pluto orbits. It is called the Kuiper Belt.
The existence of the Kuiper Belt was first predicted by mid-20th-century astronomers such as Kenneth Edgeworth and Gerard Kuiper. These and several other astronomers of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s postulated that a debris belt of material left over from planetary formation might orbit the sun beyond Neptune (much like the asteroid belt between Mars and ...