2023-10-07 04:00:24
Beyond the Kuiper Belt, on the outer edges of our Solar System, an international team of astronomers has stumbled upon something truly unusual: a dozen large, planetary-sized objects that have never been observed before. The objects, whose detection has yet to be 100% confirmed, point to the existence of a ‘second Kuiper belt’, a new hitherto unknown sector of the Solar System that would extend far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
The researchers, who announced their findings during the 54th edition of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, in Houston, they confirm something that we already knew but that never ceases to surprise us: the influence of the Sun reaches far beyond the eight worlds that form the core of our planetary system.
Beyond Neptune, in fact, the last of the planets and which is located at a distance of 30 Astronomical Units from the Sun (one AU is equivalent to the Earth-Sun distance, 150 million km) the Solar System extends at least another 100 more Astronomical Units. And beyond the ‘heliopause’, where the solar wind diffuses into the interstellar medium and loses its magnetic influence, is the Oort Cloud, an immense deposit of comets and asteroids, still trapped by the Sun’s gravity, which Scientists believe it extends beyond 1,000 Astronomical Units.
Pursuing objectives for New Horizons
As the authors explain in their article, which has yet to be accepted for publication in a scientific journal, the 12 possible massive objects are located about 60 AU from the Sun, and they were found while searching for new targets for the New Horizons spacecraft, of the NASA, which after studying Pluto is now 57 AU away and is heading towards the heliopause, in an ‘extended mission’ that extends until the end of 2029.
New Horizons itself, explains Alan Stern, the principal investigator of this mission, is continually bombarded by dust particles as it goes deeper into deep space, “and the simplest explanation for that is that there is more stuff out there than there is yet.” “we have not detected.”
The objects, on the other hand, would be found about 10 AU away from the Kuiper belt itself (1.5 billion km), and that suggests that they could be ‘stolen’ from the belt by something very massive that lies beyond. According to the researchers, that ‘something’ could be a second, more distant Kuiper belt, a new sector of our system full of unknown objects.
To try to confirm this, researchers are now reviewing the latest data, following its discovery, to see if it confirms the findings. Full of optimism, they assure that even if this confirmation does not occur, the New Horizons spacecraft itself, which in the coming years will cross that area, could see the objects directly.
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