Hundreds of thousands of icy rocks lurk around in the Kuiper Belt, a place discovered just a few decades ago, and exists far beyond Neptune. As a NASA spacecraft sojourns deeper into space, it has encountered a puzzling finding in this cosmic hinterland: The Kuiper Belt may be much bigger than expected.
Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter formed billions of years ago and their gravitational influence may have cleared out the middle of the Solar System of the objects that now live in the Kuiper Belt. Now, after having been slingshotted into the dark and frigid outer edges of the Solar System, these planetary building blocks are coming into the spotlight with missions like NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. READ MORE FROM INVERSE
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