Far beyond Neptune, astronomers have finally confirmed a compact clump of icy worlds hiding inside the Kuiper Belt, a feature they are now calling an inner “kernel.” The tightly packed structure, ...

A vast region of our solar system, called the Kuiper belt, stretches from the orbit of Neptune out to 50 or so astronomical units (AU), where an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun. This ...

New observations from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt—the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building ...

Fresh mapping of the outer solar system has revealed a previously unseen pattern in the Kuiper Belt, the icy ring of debris beyond Neptune that has long been treated as a relatively simple torus of ...

In the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the ice giant Neptune, lies a ring of comets and dwarf planets known as the Kuiper Belt. The closest of these objects are billions of kilometers away.

As next-generation telescopes map this outer frontier, astronomers are bracing for discoveries that could reveal hidden planets, strange structures, and clues to the solar system’s chaotic youth. Out ...

Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two. The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times ...

One hundred years ago today, Dutch-American astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper was born in Harenscarpel, The Netherlands. Just over one month from now, NASA plans to launch its first mission, New Horizons, ...

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling out of the solar system at an incredible speed. It is currently about 8 billion kilometres from the sun, and by the time you finish reading this story, it ...