Kuiper Belt

Firstly, the talk focused on the Kuiper Belt, which is a flat, donut shaped region in our Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune at about 30 AU to 1000 AU from the sun. The region is named after the astronomer, Gerard Kuiper. The origin of the Kuiper Belt was discussed which occurred during the formation of the Solar System, when bodies which were safe from the gravitational pull of the planets, slowly orbited the sun and formed the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt contains icy objects known as Kuiper Belt Objects which include dwarf planets with Pluto as the largest of them, comets, centaurs etc which was also talked about . The talk included explorations of the Kuiper Belt which were mostly done using ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space telescope. The 1st spacecraft to enter the Kuiper Belt was NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1983.

The next and final part of the talk was about various aspects of the Oort Cloud and how it is different from the Kuiper Belt. The Oort Cloud is believed to be a thick bubble of icy debris that surrounds the Solar System. It is named after the Dutch astronomer, Jan Oort who predicted its existence in 1950. The Oort Cloud is too far to be seen with current telescopes, so it hasn’t been directly seen or discovered. Long period comets whose orbital periods are longer than 200 years, are believed to have originated from the Oort Cloud.