2023-10-15 22:00:00
■A group of small celestial bodies located inside the Oort Cloud on the outskirts of the solar system.■Distance between 30AU and 50AU from the Sun… It is the last remaining blue ocean of space, with few small celestial bodies less than 1km in size. The United States, Russia, China, and India have awakened to the value of space early on and are pioneering space. Korea is also jumping into space development in earnest by launching the Nuri rocket, a satellite launch rocket made with its own technology, and establishing the ‘Space Administration.’ The unknown universe We are trying to tell the story of this vast and gigantic world in a fun way so that everyone, from children to adults, can easily understand it. Outside the planet Neptune, at the very edge of the solar system, is a group of small celestial bodies. It’s a place called the ‘Kuiper Belt’. The Kuiper Belt is not the end of the solar system. The ‘Oort Cloud’, which we learned regarding in the last article, is the outermost part of the solar system, and the Kuiper Belt is located inside it. The celestial bodies in the Kuiper Belt, an area where celestial bodies are concentrated in a round donut shape near the ecliptic plane outside the orbit of Neptune, are mainly water and ice. These are small asteroids composed of. The Kuiper Belt is known as the origin of ‘short-period comets’ and astronomers speculate that it may be connected to the Oort Cloud. Short-period comets are comets whose orbital period around the Sun is less than 200 years. In the past, it was thought that all comets originated from the Oort Cloud. However, given that the orbital inclination angle of short-period comets is close to 0, more weight is being placed on the argument that the origin of short-period comets is not the circular Oort Cloud, but the disk-shaped Kuiper Belt. In particular, in 1992, an asteroid called ‘1992QB1’ was discovered. After this discovery, it was discovered that numerous celestial bodies exist in the Kuiper Belt, and it became probable that this is the origin of short-period comets. The Kuiper Belt, whose existence was first suggested by American astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951, is very close to Earth. It was so far away that I mightn’t tell exactly what celestial bodies were there. The Kuiper Belt is approximately 30AU to 50AU from the Sun. 1AU is the distance between the sun and the Earth. Because it was so far away, it was difficult to observe. Accordingly, astronomers assumed that there were faint and small celestial bodies wandering in the dark in the Kuiper Belt. However, contrary to what scientists thought, it was recently revealed that there are surprisingly few small celestial bodies of around 1 km in size here. In 2019 3 In January, a research team led by Dr. Kelsey Singer of the Southwest Research Institute in the United States discovered this fact. The research team came to this conclusion by analyzing photos taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe as it passed by Pluto in 2015. Instead of directly counting small objects in the Kuiper Belt that are difficult to observe with a telescope, Dr. Singer’s research team used an indirect method of inferring the distribution of objects in the Kuiper Belt through impact craters on the surface of Pluto and its moon Charon. The images taken by New Horizons as it passed by Pluto and Charon were able to capture craters as large as 1.4 km. This occurs when a celestial body measuring regarding 100 meters collides. Dr. Singer’s research team read these photos and found that impact craters over 13 km long, created by collisions between celestial bodies over 2 km long, showed a similar distribution to what was previously expected, but between 91 m and 1.6 m. There were extremely few small impact craters created by celestial bodies measuring km (300 feet to 1 mile). The research team also interpreted the craters of Pluto and Charon as representing the distribution of Kuiper Belt celestial bodies and concluded that celestial bodies around 1 km in size are rare. I did it. This is somewhat different from the asteroid belt bodies that collided with Jupiter, Mars, and Earth. Much research is still in progress regarding the Kuiper Belt. Like the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt is an area that will need to be studied for decades to come because it is often shrouded in mystery. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud surround the solar system. Even today, scientists are looking far away to answer this question: what kind of universe will unfold beyond that boundary?
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