The Kuiper Belt

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Kuiper Belt, a vast region of icy objects at the fringes of our Solar System, beyond Neptune, in which we find the dwarf planet Pluto and countless objects left over from the origins of the solar system, some of which we observe as comets. It extends from where Neptune is, which is 30 times further out than the Earth is from the Sun, to about 500 times the Earth-Sun distance. It covers an immense region of space and it is the part of the Solar System that we know the least about, because it is so remote from us and has been barely detectable by Earth-based telescopes until recent decades. Its existence was predicted before it was known, and study of the Kuiper Belt, and how objects move within it, has led to a theory that there may be a 9th planet far beyond Neptune. With Carolin Crawford Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge Monica Grady Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University And Stephen Lowry Reader in Planetary and Space Sciences, University of Kent Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
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0:54.0	Hello, about four and a half billion years ago, a vast cloud of dust and gas collapsed and gave rise to our solar system.
1:01.0	Much of the gas became the sun, as much of the dust
1:04.3	became the planets. At the fringes of the solar system some dust combined with
1:08.8	ice to make smaller objects and there in what's called a Kuiper belt they've largely remained unchanged.
1:14.8	Occasionally they come much closer as comets.
1:18.1	There are larger objects among them too like Pluto, which we once thought to be a planet. These distant objects orbit the Sun in patterns
1:25.8	which suggest not only where our known planets used to be millions of years
1:29.6	before but at the possible existence of a nine's massive planet far beyond Neptune.
1:35.0	We need to discuss the Kaipa Bell R. Carolyn Crawford,
	...

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