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Home "The surrounding world" Planets and stars "The Solar System" The Edgeworth Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud
The Edgeworth Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are published in the section: Education
Trans Neptunian objects At the moment, Neptune is recognized as the most distant planet in the Solar system.
As for Pluto, since 2006, the International Astronomical Union has demoted it from the definition of being a " planet "and became part of the Kuiper Belt, receiving the definition of a"dwarf planet".
Distant celestial objects whose average distance to the Sun is greater than that of Neptune, while they orbit the Sun, are called "trans Neptunian objects".
Therefore, the largest trans Neptunian objects located in the Kuiper Belt include Pluto, its large satellite Charon, the massive dwarf planet Eris and about 1400 other trans Neptunian objects Beyond the orbit of the farthest planet from the Sun of Neptune, the Kuiper Belt begins, which is the residual material after the construction of the Solar System in the form of various objects similar to asteroids, only consisting mainly of ice, methane, ammonia and water.
After the discovery of the Kuiper Belt in 1992, the number of designated objects exceeded 1000, including the famous dwarf planets Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.
At the beginning of the discovery, it was believed that the Kuiper Belt was the building material for comets whose short orbital period did not exceed 200 years, but later it turned out that the source could be a dynamically active region called the scattered disk, whose orbits of objects go a long distance from the Sun (over 100 AU).
Scattered disk This region is too far from the Sun, where there is a small number of celestial bodies consisting mainly of ice.
How and from what did the area with such "scattered" objects appear (they are also classified as "trans Neptunian objects"), but
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most scientists are inclined to believe that such a field appeared from Kuiper Belt objects due to gravitational interaction with external planets, one of which was the large planet Neptune.
The Oort Cloud
The area that has not yet been confirmed by technical means is very far from the Sun from 50 thousand to 100 thousand AU (this is about 1 light year) and about 1/4 of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar system.
The outer spherical part of the Oort cloud defines the gravitational boundary of the Solar System — the so called Hill sphere, defined for the Solar system in 2 light years.
The inner region of the Oort cloud is represented in the form of a disk.
The objects of the Oort cloud consist of ice (in composition with water, ammonia and methane).
It is believed that the formation of the Oort cloud began near the Sun, and then its objects were scattered over huge distances by the gravity of large giant planets of the Solar System at the very beginning of its formation.
Now the Oort cloud is considered a hypothetical region, because direct observations have not yet been technically made, nevertheless, there is reason to believe that this region is the source of the formation of many long period comets whose path passes through the Solar System.
At this stage of the study, 4 objects can be assumed to belong to the Oort cloud: a trans Neptunian object, probably a dwarf planet, 90377 Sedna; an object (148209) 2000 CR105 located at an average distance of 216 AU from the Sun and which is unlikely to be classified as a dwarf planet; a distant trans Neptunian object (308933) 2006 SQ372; as well as a trans Neptunian object an asteroid with a diameter of 40-90 km with a very high inclination of the retrograde orbit 2008 KV42
Exploration of distant objects of the Solar system
(The red square is the location of "New Horizons", the blue line is the route) The closest exploration by a spacecraft of distant objects of the Solar System is likely to be carried out by the New Horizons spacecraft, which is flying to its goal of studying the Pluto Charon system, in order to then go to study objects of the Kuiper Belt.
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July 15, 2016 20: 29
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