Kuiper Belt: Realm of the Dwarf Planets

this video is brought to you by Squarespace the tool to use to make a website for your brand and grow your business more on them in a bit [Music] on the extreme outer edge of our solar system lies a semi-uncharted realm the place is dark remote and mysterious as is possible to imagine out here strange worlds look far beyond the warming rays of the sun dwarf planets Frozen inside prisons of ice worlds with orbits that take them swinging impossibly far away into the darkness minor planets that's been so fast their very shape has become distorted out here too you'll find primordial objects fragments of rock that date back to the formation of the solar system ancient primitive asteroids forged into unusual shapes slowly twisting through the void sounds almost like the stuff of sci-fi fantasy doesn't it a mysterious region of space filled with as yet undiscovered riches except the Kuiper belt is very real and as we learn more about it it's starting to become clear that it may be the most intriguing place in our solar system in today's video we're going to take a trip beyond the orbit of Neptune and examine the next great Frontier year of space exploration if you were to climb aboard a Tardis and fly out to the Kuiper Bell for a bit of a poke around the first thing that you probably notice is that it's very very cold starting just beyond the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU from the Sun the main body of the belt stretches all the way out to 50 Au with 1au representing the distance between the Earth and our home star that's billions upon billions of kilometers distance so distant that the sun would look like nothing more than a particularly bright star so distant that the light it gave off would seem equal to only a full moon here on Earth and that's just the main part of the Kuiper belt the bit everyone agrees is a single structure beyond that lies something known as the scattered disc a realm that stretches so far out it would make the distance between Earth and the Kuiper belt looked like a gentle morning stroll at is absolutely most extreme the disc is thought to extend out to a terrifying 1000 Au a vast sweep of space across which the light and heat of our sun would get aggressively dimmer until it began to feel like you were traveling through Endless Night now not everyone agrees that the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc are a single structure some astronomers prefer to think of them as two distinct entities that just happened to share some common members sort of like how the Netherlands and Northern Belgium are different nations despite sharing a language and a fondness for cheese but if we do consider them together then the Kuiper belt is simply one of the largest structures in our solar system so big only things like the sun's heliosphere can really compete which begs the question what exactly is it well in its most basic form the Kuiper belt is a gigantic ring of primordial rocks and icy fragments known by many as the Kuiper belt objects or kbos we say no by many because there are plenty of clever sides due to intensely dislike this name preferring instead Trans nipped Union objects since we all went ahead Untitled this video the Kuiper belt though we're just gonna go with kbo to make our lives easier anyway the total confirmed count of kbos currently stands at over 2000 but this is thought not to be just the tip of the titanic-sized iceberg but barely the tiniest fraction of the uppermost snowflake sitting on its Summit if our current estimates are correct the Kuiper belt is home to Millions upon millions of objects of these hundreds of thousands are likely over a hundred kilometers wide hundreds maybe over a thousand kilometers dozens maybe even bigger than the Region's most famous residents Pluto by comparison the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has nothing close to this size even lovable Underdog dwarf planet series can't compete with the Kuiper belt's big daddies still as they say size and everything there's also mass and it's here that this great realm falls short for all its Millions upon millions of kbos and its scattering of dwarf planets the entire Kuiper belt is thought to contain significantly less mass than our home World maybe a mere 10 of what this Fat Bottomed Beauty we call Earth is rocket although anything this wasn't always the case billions of years ago the Kuiper belt may have contained up to seven times the mass of our world only for it to be rudely torn Away by the outer planets that's because the orbits of Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune shifted wildly in the early days of our solar system shifts that ultimately caused the Kuiper Bell's undoing in a bunch of hyper-complex gravitational interactions were not even remotely qualified to even understand the movements of Jupiter and Saturn shoved Neptune towards the outer edge of the solar system like a pair of particles expelling a disruptive drunk as she rolled away from the planetary gear together Neptune did what disruptive trunks always do she went crashing into things angrily hurling objects only these objects weren't half empty bottles but kbos kbos that might have coalesced together into a planet one day if Neptune's gravity hadn't disrupted them hurling some further out and sending others swinging inwards towards Jupiter to meet their Fates man all of this disruption is still visible today far from being a uniform ring of uniform objects the Kuiper belt is more like a strange family gathering of weirdos eccentrics and unclassifiable oddballs so let's get to know them shall we although there are quite a few classes the basic division for kbos can be summed up as exactly how much did Neptune's drunken Rampage mess them up for cold classical kobios the answer is not at all these are the objects most like the platonic ideal of what the Kuiper belt should be they all orbit in the main belt about 40 or 50 a.u from the Sun their orbits are basically circular they're perhaps only a little tilted off the planetary plane if at all and they behave like they should hot classical kdos by contrast are still suffering the after effects of interacting with Neptune's gravity rather than obediently poodling around like their cold classical breath or on hot kbos have weird eccentric orbits that send them zooming far away from the Sun before bringing them swinging back in oh and just to be clear the hot and cold definitions are strictly a way of differentiating orbits not some sort of comment on whether you could roast marshmallows over their surface but Neptune didn't just scatter the objects it interacted with others it brought into its watery Embrace we call these captives resident cabios for the simple reason that they orbit in resonance with Planet 8. what that means is that for every time Neptune goes around the Sun resonant kabos likewise go around a set number of times so maybe you have an object that goes around once every time Neptune completes two orbits or two times for every three of Neptune's Journeys that last example wasn't pulled out of her asses either the most famous kabio of all is a three to two resonance with Planet eight beloved dwarf planet Pluto nor is our favorite Spaceball the only one in fact so many Resident kbos are following Pluto's lead that astronomers now classify any with a 3-2 resonance as plutinos the category even includes another candidate dwarf planet the ice Rich World orcas yet another can be found in our next category the family of kbos that never gets close enough to be influenced by Neptune that attached objects the detached objects are the real weirdos of the Kuiper belt family the astronomical equivalent of your cousin who drops out of college to go live in a commune my card kbos they have an unusual orbit blooping far far from our Star before drifting back in unlike their hot Brethren though we can't blame Neptune for this the closest attached objects get only 40 Au towards the sun compared to Neptune's roughly 30 Au orbit that 10au difference is roughly the distance separating our Sun from Saturn and this is only those that get closest some detached objects like the dwarf planet candidate saidner never came closer than 76 Au at their most remote they Retreat to a staggering 1200 Au distant Beyond the Edge of the scatter disk all of which is why certain astronomers are convinced there must be some large mass object out there influencing their orbits an object some believe it's a hypothetical planet nine finally there's a family of objects sedna travels far beyond those of the scattered disc like detached objects those in the scattered disc tend to Journey way out to beyond the main belt the large dwarf planet heiress gets almost most 100 Au away unlike sedna though most of them return back to Neptune's rough orbit at their closest pass to the sun more victims of the giant planets disruptive gravity yet for all they may be grouped into multiple families kbos have some surprising things in common one of which is that they tend to have a twin of the 2000 plus known kbos a surprisingly large percentage are making their otherwise lonely Journey with a companion for the larger objects this is often a moon heiress and orcas both have tiny moonlets accompanying them as do core into haumea more interesting though are the binary systems the are twin objects that both have such high mass that one doesn't simply orbit the other instead they spin around a shared point in space what's known as a shared Center of mass the most famous of these is Pluto and its Moon car on but there are other smaller examples last and perhaps most interesting are the contact binaries these are twin objects that have touched transforming into a single shape look at our first look at one in 2019 when the New Horizons probe visited aracos sending back ghostly images of a red snowman-shaped rock turning in the darkness a rock that may be the oldest and most primordial that Humanity has ever seen But while that concludes our tour of the kbo family there's still one more official category a controversial designation that nonetheless includes some of the most fascinating objects in our solar system we're talking of course about the dwarf planets now let me interrupt this video to quickly tell you about our long time sponsor Squarespace look you've heard me talk about them before and honestly if you're making a website anywhere else in 2022 well that just seems a little bit insane because Squarespace of all the tools you could ever need in one place and not only that but that place is super easy to navigate and make a website from all you got to do is head over to Squarespace from there the next step those of you that want to be quick is to browse through their extensive selection of templates and they make that super easy they ask you you know what's your website about and you say it's about whatever you do and then they're like well you'll probably like these templates and you're like oh I do you choose one boom it loads up there's some placehold attacks some placeholder images you just replace those and you are good to go there's a lot of other features you can use for example put a little email form on your site so people who could be interested in what you're selling or what you're doing can get in touch with you of course that increases your inbound business of course all the basics like analyst critics and blogs are included as well look there really isn't a better place to make a website so head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com Geographics to save 10 of your first purchasable website or a domain and now back to today's video [Music] in our entire solar system there is only a single dwarf planet series that isn't located in the Kuiper belt or the scattered disc the rest lurk on the very edges of our solar system A peculiar magnificent class of Worlds that are smaller than any of the classical planets smaller even than the Solar System's largest moons yet many represent the next great Frontier in space exploration thanks to a lack of visits we know relatively little about most of them far too little for us to have made individual videos on each one but we do know enough to give them a collective chapter in this episode so in lieu of individual Explorations join us as we give these guys the condensed Astro Graphics treatment ironically the most important dwarf planet is also one we really do know a lot about Pluto discovered in 1930 by self-taught astronomer Clyde tomboy the former ninth planet is the first kbo ever witnessed by Humanity it also played a major role in our discovery of the Kuiper belt itself because Pluto is so small far far smaller than Mercury people began to wonder if it wasn't a planet at all but rather part of a class of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth suggested this as early as the 1940s but it would be Gerard Kuiper's 1951 paper that eventually gave this mysterious region its name by the early 1990s there were serious doubts that Pluto was unique doubt that culminated in 1992 when the second major kbo was finally spotted the planet tassimal known as 15760 Albion with a diameter of only 108 kilometers Albion isn't all that interesting in and of itself but its effect on astronomy was comparable to that of Ivy Mike on no attack atoll it blew everything wide open 1993 saw a slew of new kbo sightings sightings that would eventually trigger the controversial decision to downgrade Pluto sightings that would soon also introduce us to some of the most intriguing objects in our solar system all these perhaps the most intriguing of all is how mayor discovered in 2003 and named after hawan goddess how mayor is a dwarf planet it will be a one significantly smaller than Pluto while the king of the kaipur bar rocks has a radius of 1188 kilometers our Maya according to NASA clocks in at just 620 kilometers what it lacks in size though how mayor more than makes up for in weirdness rotating once every four hours the dwarf planet is the fastest spinning large object in our solar system in fact it rotates so fast that the force has distorted its shape rather than looking round like a ball how mayor instead appears strangely elongated like some kind of giant space egg discarded by a cosmic Chef it's also the first kbo known to have rings and the first dwarf planet although large asteroids like chericlo likewise rockering systems yet it may be what we can't see that really makes hamare a treasure deep below its surface scientists think the dwarf planet may have once hosted an ocean of water an ocean that remained liquid for up to 250 million years if you're playing astrographics bingo you've probably been waiting for what I'm going to say next the subsurface ocean means it's not impossible to once played home to life with the ocean today having long frozen over its doubtful will ever confirm this for sure but the idea that a dwarf planet all the way out in the Kuiper Bells may have hosted liquid water raises all sorts of profound questions about where we may one day find microbes if our mayor was once habitable for thinking goes so too could many other places in the universe so yeah there'll be a pretty amazing for a weird little space egg less utterly weird but still pretty fascinating is makamake another dwarf planet discovered in 2005 makamaka has a radius of 715 kilometers equivalent to 444 miles this also spectacularly bright the second brightest kbo after Pluto and while it's too remote for us to really study it we do know it has snow fields of Frozen ethane and methane on the surface we know too that it Sports its own Moon and seems to have similar coloring to the former ninth planet yet even if Mark and Marque is another potential Pluto it still pales in comparison to its sibling Eris if you know the name it may be because heiress is in with a radius of only 20 kilometers smaller than Pluto but a larger Mass it was eris's 2005 discovery that torpedoed Pluto's chances of remaining a planet but we're not here today to rehash the is Pluto a planet debate we already covered it in our video on well Pluto instead are we here to Marvel at objects like Eris and its Moon dysnomia objects so far from the Sun it takes over 550 years for them to make a complete orbit meaning they were last in this position when England was fighting the wars of the Roses objects so vast they can only be described as worlds and what worlds they may be along with how mayor's frozen ocean evidence is slowly emerging that many of the dwarf planets may be rich in liquid water perhaps in the form of Briny Seas hidden deep in their Interiors perhaps in the form of cryovolcanoes oozing H2O across their Frozen Landscapes like lava if that's the case then it has stunning implications Eris bakamake even smaller objects like orcas or extremely remote ones like gong gong may have once supported water and they may even sport it now sadly it may be a long time before we get any confirmation either way because while the kite the bells may be the next Frontier for space exploration that doesn't mean anyone is planning to visit it right now if we want to study the Kuiper belt up close there is a single active mission that we can rely on New Horizons was one of the Blockbuster probes of the 2010s the mission that gave Humanity its first close encounter with Pluto sending back images that Enchanted us all the probe that conducted the first flyby of a primordial kbo the weird snowman shaped contact binary known as arakov now as we drift onwards through the nightmare of the 2020s through a decade of pandemic and War it remains a ray of Hope a chance to illuminate our Cosmos further with this Mission recently extended by nasarit 2025 the New Horizons probe is currently doing a whole lot of important science on stuff like the heliosphere which is great but sadly not all that relevant to this video but while the official end date for its mission is currently a mere three years away that doesn't mean it'll actually shut down then with a good supply of nuclear fuel New Horizons is thought to be viable until at least 2040. that's an additional 18 years of sweeping through the Kuiper belt and if NASA chooses to keep extending its mission that whole time it could result in some awesome surprises currently the ground team are using telescopes to hunt for new kbos their hope is that they'll uncover something roughly within the probe's path Something New Horizons could study from afar as it zips past on its Fantastic Voyage they may even if we're extremely lucky find a kbo close enough that New Horizons can alter its course and conduct a proper flyby getting as close as it did to arakoth in 2019. if that happens it'll be like finding a cosmic Easter egg a final bonus to finish out the mission giving us a whole new insight into the building blocks of our solar system and the best part any new kbo New Horizons encounters could be completely different to the gold classical kbo that it visited in 2019 it might even be from an entirely different family yet as awesome as another close encounter would be and we've got our fingers tightly crossed on this one there's still something a little Melancholy about it with no new probes planned whatever New Horizons sees next would truly be our final encounter with the kbo for the foreseeable future the end bar micro era of exploration within the Kuiper belt to be honest it's hard to blame NASA the belt is extremely far away and takes an extremely long time to get to space missions are expensive and the agency would much rather concentrate on the Epic staff they've been doing closer to home returning samples from Mars putting humans back on the moon and sending probes to explore icy moons with subsurface oceans compared to these clear-cut goals a mission to aerys or how mayor or to investigate a bunch of arakoth starts to look like a potential budget catastrophe luckily though the lack of upcoming missions doesn't mean the end of our Kuiper Belt exploration in fact the greatest era of all may just be getting started less than two years from now in 2024 one of the most badass telescopes in human history is going to open its eye atop a mountain in Chile and revolutionize everything known as the virusy Reuben Observatory it will come equipped with an 8.4 meter mirror that will survey the entire night sky every few days a mission known as the Legacy survey of space and time now 8.4 meters isn't the biggest telescope out there even today and it has nothing on the upcoming 30 meter telescope or the extremely large telescope both planned to come online in 2027. where veracy Reuben will excel though is in its ability to process data at eye-watering speeds flagging up hundreds of objects per night generating an unprecedented number of discoveries among them are predicted to be squash of new asteroids and near-earth objects countless Supernova binary black holes and neutron stars and Beyond Neptune it's expected to find roughly 40 000 new objects that humans have never seen before try for a second to get your head around that right now we're aware of roughly 2 000 kbos and just that smallish number has been enough for us to Glimpse Frozen dwarf planets weird spinning egg things and other stuff that's transformed astronomy now imagine how things will look once we've got a data set 20 times larger imagine what sort of spectacular kbos or even kbo families could be hiding out there in the dark waiting to be discovered the veracy Reuben in short is going to change everything 10 years from now people will look back on this video and laugh at how little 2022 dudes knew about the outer solar system at how we never came close to grasping how truly Magnificent the Kuiper belt is and honestly we hope that happens because if it does it means we've got a future ahead of us filled with exciting discoveries a future that we can't wait to be a part of there may be no upcoming probes it may not be on many lay people's radar but as promised earlier the Kuiper belt is the next great Frontier now it's up to telescopes like the Vera C Reuben to take us boldly where no one has gone before foreign

Channel: Geographics

Views: 310,994

Keywords: kuiper belt, the kuiper belt, kuiper belt objects, kuiper, what is the kuiper belt, asteroid belt, planet, science, planets, planet 9, the solar system, solar system facts, dwarf planet, solar system, dwarf planets, space

Id: jC5CiuNBXgk

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022