What is the difference between kuiper belt and orbital period

Women at the Helm. The highest resolution images offer about feet 33 meters per pixel. New Horizons Flyby: Where to Watch. Closest approach takes place in the early morning hours of New Year's Day— a. EST—marking the most distant close exploration of worlds ever completed by humankind. Without Hubble's intriguing early images, there might have never been a mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

From its brightness and size, New Horizons team members have calculated Ultima's reflectivity, which is only about 10 percent, or about as dark as garden dirt.

Beyond that, nothing else is known about it. With no apparent hazards in its way, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been given a "go" to stay on its optimal path as it speeds closer to a Jan.

It's vast and mysterious, cold and dark. It's a place we've only just begun to explore. Here are 10 things to know about the Kuiper Belt. Small worlds witnessed dramatic changes in our solar system that occurred long before humans. The comet Hale-Bopp is said to have originated from the Oort cloud, which is a long term comet. The Oort cloud is a significant element of the solar system. The Oort cloud not only contains comets but also contains asteroids. Some comets from the Oort cloud can disappear as well.

There are several interesting facts about the Oort cloud making it one of the most interesting elements of the solar system. Both the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud hold significance and play an important role in the solar system as well.

Both of them have their characteristic independent features. Both the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud are important for the study of the planetary system. They are a source of long-term and short-term comets. They both are important study material to study about the planets and other things about them. Skip to content There exist a lot of variations in the things that are present in the universe and the solar system, to be specific. A disc-like shaped element that exists in the solar system around the vicinity of a star resembling an asteroid belt is known as the Kuiper belt.

Like some other plutinos, Pluto's perihelion distance is closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a collision with the ice planet is avoided by a protecting mechanism associated with the mean motion resonance coupled with the Kozai resonance, which places Neptune at a wide angle from Pluto when the dwarf planet is near its perihelion.

The plutinos probably had a similar origin to the hot population, as they share the same physical properties. The difference is that the plutinos are still in resonance while the hot population is not.

Two scenarios aim at explaining the origin of the resonant orbits of the plutinos. In a smooth migration scenario Malhotra, , as Neptune migrates outwards by interaction with the planetesimals disk, the resonances with the planet migrate outwards as well. In doing so, they sweep through the planetesimal disk. Consequently, many planetesimals got captured in resonances; after capture, they migrate with the resonance, increasing their orbital eccentricities, by a classical mechanics phenomenon called adiabatical invariance.

In the Nice model, planetesimals get trapped in mean motion resonances while they are still being scattered by the planet, which at the time had a more eccentric orbit. The eccentricities of the resonant particles were initially large, but they could decrease due to secular interactions with the eccentric orbit of Neptune or due to the Kozai resonance.

The most distant of the scattered disk bodies found to date is astronomical units from the Sun at aphelion. But this same object is as close as 24 astronomical units at perihelion, revealing a highly eccentric orbit. More generally, the characteristic of scattered objects is an orbit with semi major axis larger than 50 AU and a perihelion distance not far beyond Neptune's orbit, so that strong perturbations are felt by the object when it passes at perihelion in conjunction with Neptune scattering events.

These perturbations are capable of modifying the orbit in a non-periodic way. Consequently, all scattered disk objects are, by definition, on unstable orbits, which can radically change in a relatively short period of time. Possibly, the orbital changes can lead to the dynamical removal of the object. It is expected, in fact, that the scattered disk population has decayed in time, since the early epochs of the solar system.

The scattered disk is considered to be the main source of Jupiter family comets Levison and Duncan The detached objects also have very large average distances from the Sun but they differ from the scattered objects in that at their closest distance perihelion they are not close enough to Neptune to experience strong perturbations that would otherwise make their average distance from the Sun vary considerably.

In other words, the detached objects are in stable orbits. Thus, in a sense we could differentiate a scattered object from a detached object by their perihelion distances. However, it is not a very good idea to fix a threshold value for the perihelion to distinguish detached from scattered objects. This is because being in a stable or unstable orbit may depend on other factors like being in resonance with Neptune.

Perhaps the best way to distinguish these bodies is through a numerical simulation of the evolution of their orbits during a long enough time to check for possible large variations of the semimajor axis. Such simulations suggest that perihelion distances above 40 AU characterize detached objects, less than 35 AU characterize scattered objects, while in between these values we should check for its orbital behavior more carefully.

The fact that in many cases it is difficult to distinguish a scattered object from a detached one may be a simple consequence of the fact that these orbits have a common origin. In fact the best explanation for the origin of a detached object is that it was once a scattered object that managed to get into a more stable orbit through resonance perturbations with Neptune.

A good hypothesis for the origin of its orbit is that it was a past scattered object that became trapped in the resonance with Neptune, had its perihelion distance increased by the Kozai resonance and escaped resonance while in low eccentricity high perihelion , reaching a stable orbit near the resonance with Neptune, with high perihelion distance and high inclination Gomes Sedna is a singular trans-Neptunian object that cannot be included in any of the populations so far defined.

Sedna's mean distance from the Sun associated to its remarkably high perihelion distance cannot be reproduced by the same process that probably created the detached population. The most likely scenario for its orbital generation also assumes that Sedna was in the past scattered by Neptune.

But the mechanism responsible to raise its perihelion cannot be associated to the present orbital architecture of the Solar System. The most likely scenario to detach Sedna from the scattered disk supposes that while the Sun inhabited its primordial star cluster, Jupiter and Saturn were scattering remnant planetesimals that were not accreted to the gas giants Brasser et al.

Due to strong tidal perturbations from the primordial cluster some planetesimals had their perihelion increased and stayed like that until after the cluster dissipated. Another scenario invokes a still undiscovered planetary-mass solar companion Gomes et al. KBOs in a resonance are called plutinos , named after Pluto. The Oort cloud has never been observed but is thought to be a spherical distribution of icy objects like comets orbiting our Sun at distances between and , AU.

It is also believed to be the origin of many of the long-period comets in the solar system. The objects in the Oort cloud probably formed closer to the Sun, around the present day orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and were then pushed out to their current positions by gravitational interactions with the planets. Astronomers theorize that there are approximately 10 12 to 10 13 members of the Oort cloud with a total mass of about Earth masses. Objects within the Kuiper belt are affected by the gravitation of the planets.

Further out, is a region of the Oort cloud from AU where objects are not affected by the planets. From 2,, AU, objects in the cloud are affected by galactic tidal forces, and in the outer Oort cloud, from 15,, AU, objects are affected by the gravity of other stars. Outside the Oort cloud, the Sun's gravitation is not strong enough to keep objects in orbit.