Monday, November 25, 2013

Kuiper belt and oort cloud.....

                                                     Kuiper belt

Kuiper belt ,It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is far larger 20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.The Kuiper Belt is located at around 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km) from the sun and extends several billion miles.It was discovered in 1992.The Kuiper Belt is a comet-rich area of our solar system that begins near the orbit of Neptune and continues beyond PlutoThe Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are regions of space.The known icy worlds and comets in both regions are much smaller than Earth's moon.There may be are hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 100 km (62 miles) and an estimated trillion or more comets within the Kuiper Belt. The Oort Cloud may contain more than a trillion icy bodies.Some dwarf planets within the Kuiper Belt have thin atmospheres that collapse when their orbit carries them farthest from the sun.Pluto & Sedna r also the object of Kuiper belt.The Oort Cloud,its begins at 750 billion km from the sun and ends at the very edge of our solar system, almost 1 light year from the sun. It is a massive spherical cloud containing billions of icy bodies. Occasionally these bodies get knocked out of their orbit and enter the inner solar system, they then become comets. Although some comets originate from the Kuiper Belt most come from the Oort Cloud. Both the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are named for the astronomers who predicted their existence during the 1950s: Gerard Kuiper and Jan Oort.

Pluto & Sedna.....

                                                               Pluto
                                                                   Sedna

Pluto & Sedna, two dwarf planets in a very far away from our sun.In ancient Greek religion and myth, Pluto was a name for the ruler of the underworld, the god was also known as Hades, the name of the underworld itself,& the brother of Jupiter(Zeus). Sedna is a very significant figure in Inuit mythology. There are a number of different versions of the myth of Sedna.Sedna is the Inuit Goddess of the Sea.Pluto's surface is one of the coldest places in the solar system at roughly minus 375 degrees F (minus 225 degrees C).It was 1st discovered in 1930.Its about 4.4–7.4 billion km far from the Sun.Pluto was originally classified as the ninth planet from the Sun.Sedna,on 15 March 2004, astronomers from Caltech, Gemini Observatory, and Yale University announced the discovery of the coldest, most distant object known to orbit the sun. The object was found at a distance 90 times greater than that from the sun to the earth -- about 3 times further than Pluto, the most distant known planet.Its about 90 AU (1 AU is an Astronomical Unit, the distance between the earth and the Sun)  far from our sun.Sedna's surface composition is similar to that of some other trans-Neptunian objects, being largely a mixture of water, methane and nitrogen ices with tholins. Its surface is one of the reddest in the Solar System.This two dwarf planets are the objects of Kuiper belt ...