Astronomers Are Closing In on the Kuiper Belt’s Secrets

Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.

“Beyond Neptune, we have a census of what’s out there in the solar system, but it’s a patchwork of surveys, and it leaves a lot of room for things that might be there that have been missed,” says Renu Malhotra, who serves as Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor and Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona.

“I think that’s the big thing that Rubin is going to do—fill out the gaps in our knowledge of the contents of the solar system,” she adds. “It’s going to greatly advance our census and our knowledge of the contents of the solar system.”

As a consequence, astronomers are preparing for a flood of discoveries from this new frontier, which could shed light on a host of outstanding questions. Are there new planets hidden in the belt, or lurking beyond it? How far does this region extend? And are there traces of cataclysmic past encounters between worlds—both homegrown or from interstellar space—imprinted in this largely pristine collection of objects from the deep past?

“I think this will become a very hot field very soon, because of LSST,” says Amir Siraj, a graduate student at Princeton University who studies the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a graveyard of planetary odds and ends that were scattered far from the sun during the messy birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Pluto was the first KBO ever spotted, more than a half-century before the belt itself was discovered.

Since the 1990s, astronomers have found a handful of other dwarf planets in the belt, such as Eris and Sedna, along with thousands of smaller objects. While the Kuiper Belt is not completely static, it is, for the most part, an intact time capsule of the early solar system that can be mined for clues about planet formation.

For example, the belt contains weird structures that may be signatures of past encounters between giant planets, including one particular cluster of objects, known as a “kernel,” located at about 44 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun (about 93 million miles).

While the origin of this kernel is still unexplained, one popular hypothesis is that its constituent objects—which are known as cold classicals—were pulled along by Neptune’s outward migration through the solar system more than 4 billion years ago, which may have been a bumpy ride.

The idea is that “Neptune got jiggled by the rest of the gas giants and did a bit of a jump; it’s called the ‘jumping Neptune’ scenario,” says Wes Fraser, an astronomer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, National Research Council of Canada, who studies the Kuiper Belt, noting that astronomer David Nesvorný came up with the idea.