This month's topic:
Last month's topic: The Moon
On the outskirts of the solar system, there is an unknown region which some think is the home of the comets. Some believe it is a belt of left over material from when the solar system was created, known as the Kupier belt, and some think it is a cloud of left over cosmic dust and ice, known as the Oort Cloud. While not yet proven in its existence, it is though that there is something beyond the planet Pluto where ice and dust balls are still hanging around. It only takes a small change in gravity, such as a passing galaxy, or even the passing of a planet (such as Neptune, or Pluto) to shake one of these dust and ice balls out of its orbit around the sun. Sometimes it begins to "fall" towards the sun, and sometimes it is sent out into neverland.
Located beyond the planet Neptune (as of now, Neptune is the outermost planet in the solar system due to the orbital paths of Neptune and Pluto), the Oort cloud is thought to be a cloud of dust and ice, which was created when the sun began its life. The cosmic dust of which the solar system was created was not fully consumed by the sun during its creation. Instead, it coagulated into the planets, and there is some dust still in orbit billions of miles outside the outermost planet, which still hasn't been consumed by the sun or has become another planet Instead, the dust is what we know of as comets as it is mostly made of ice and other elements of the universe.
As the gravity shakes one of these chunks away from its orbit, it normally falls toward the sun and in some cases, creates its own orbit as a regular comet, such as Haley's Comet, or Hale-Bopp. Usually, it just falls into the sun or crashes into a planet like Jupiter (such as Shoemaker-Levi-9 in 1995). The remaining dust is thought to be half as wide as the known solar system is now. (In other words, the size of the Oort Cloud/ Kupier Belt is as wide as the distance from the sun to just past Jupiter). Sometimes, though, the gravity will cause the comet to fall out of solar orbit and move freely through intra-galactic space until another star or galaxy captures it.
The Kupier Belt is the same idea only it has a different name. Kupier thought up one, and Oort thought the other up. So how did these two scientists come up with an idea of left over stuff in the solar system? The same way we found Pluto: by looking at endless photos of space as seen through a telescope. They looked for minute changes in the position of an object and mathematically figured out its size and distance from earth. Using spectrometers and other telescopic devices, they can figure out the composition of these objects and therefore what it is. Once this was figured out and the location, a hypothesis was created. These hypotheses are helped when we look at other stars that have disks around them, known as planetary nebulae. Scientists think that one existed around the sun a billion years ago, and a little is still left over outside Neptune.
Some scientists believe that Pluto may be the best evidence of the Kupier Belt since it is unlike the rest of the outer planets, which are gaseous. Pluto is like Earth, Mars, Mercury, and Venus, which are all "rocky" planets. Pluto could be the first bit of the left over dust within the Kupier belt and may have been pulled in to its own orbit due to its relatively large size in comparison to a comet of normal size. Pluto also has its own satellite, which is why we consider it a planet.
This was researched in a relatively short time and with limited resources, and I am not sure of its complete accuracy. Should you know more, or have more updated info, please email it to me at tinytall@hotmail.com and send me the info or a link. Please see my other pages in Cosmology by linking to one of these pages: The Moon Big Bang Black Holes or you can see other educational links by going to my links page and linking to one of the many pages I have linked to. Further reading into bot the Oort Cloud and Kupier Belt can be viewed at this link.
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Eric Tallberg
23 Mar, 1998