Kuiper April 16, 2012
Posted by CosmicThespian in Word of the week.Tags: astronomy, astronomy word of the week, comets, pluto, solar system
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Article has moved: the astronomy word of the week is “kuiper”.
AstroWoW
Exploring the Universe. One word at a time.
Tags: astronomy, astronomy word of the week, comets, pluto, solar system
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I didn’t expect to learn so much on a Monday morning. Fascinating.
Glad I could make your Monday so informative.
Don’t let it happen again.
As the most recently observed section of the Solar System, the Kuiper belt is an amazing section of our neighbourhood. For example, as you may know, Recently, scientists found an object, 2003 UB313, that is bigger than Pluto. New observations of Kuiper belt objects essentially killed Pluto as a plausible planet: it just isn’t feasible to teach school children 10,000 planets! (8 is more than enough!) Excellent article.
Thanks for the comments. The Kuiper Belt is indeed a fascinating and oft-forgotten region of the solar system — this was a fun one to write. Can’t wait for New Horizons to reach Pluto (and beyond) in a few years….
Me neither, it should throw up some very interesting results and observations!