Good Morning India:Good Luck, Omar Abdullah

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In the late 1980s, however, scientists determined that something like the Kuiper Belt was needed to explain why many short-period comets orbit so close to the plane of the solar system. This circumstantial evidence of a distant belt of bodies orbiting in the same region as Pluto drove observers back to their telescopes in search of faint, undiscovered objects beyond Neptune. By the 1980s telescopes were being equipped with electronic light detectors that made searches far more sensitive than work done previously with photographic plates. As a result, success would come their way.

In 1992, astronomers at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii discovered the first Kuiper Belt object (KBO), which was found to be about 10 times as small as and almost 10,000 times as faint as Pluto. Since then, observers have found more than 600 KBOs, with diameters ranging from 50 to almost 1,200 kilometre. (Pluto’s diameter is about 2,400 kilometre.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Extrapolating from the small fraction of the sky that has been surveyed so far, investigators estimate that the Kuiper Belt contains approximately 100,000 objects larger than 100 kilometre across. As a result, the Kuiper Belt has turned out to be the big brother to the asteroid belt, with far more mass and far more objects (especially of large sizes).

Astronomers have recently learned that Pluto is not an anomaly, as once believed, but the brightest of a vast ensemble of objects orbiting in a distant region called the Kuiper Belt. Scientists want to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt objects because they may hold clues to the early history of the planets. Pluto and its moon, Charon, are also intriguing in their own right. The two bodies are so close in size that astronomers consider them a double planet. In addition, Pluto has a rapidly escaping atmosphere and complex seasonal patterns.