Kuiper belt

The Kuiper belt ( or ),Kuiper belt – oxforddictionaries.com occasionally called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, may have originated in the region.Johnson, Torrence V.; and Lunine, Jonathan I.; Saturn's moon Phoebe as a captured body from the outer Solar System, Nature, Vol. 435, pp. 69–71
==References==
Category:Glossary
Category:Circumstellar discs
Category:The Solar System