At what was once thought to be the edge of the Solar System, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has discovered evidence of a “second Kuiper Belt.”
New Horizons is one of NASA’s farthest-active spacecraft, heading toward the outer boundaries of the Solar System.
In recent years, the spacecraft has traversed the vast Kuiper Belt, located at the outer edge of the Solar System, starting beyond the orbit of Neptune (approximately 30 astronomical units – AU). One AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
This belt contains countless icy celestial bodies, collectively known as trans-Neptunian objects.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Pluto in 2015 – (Graphic: NASA/JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY).
For a long time, the Kuiper Belt was thought to be the outermost structure of the Solar System. However, the dust measurements that New Horizons has encountered over the past few years have led NASA to a surprising conclusion.
According to EarthSky, Alan Stern, the lead scientist of the New Horizons mission, stated that this NASA spacecraft has found evidence of an “extended Kuiper Belt”, or possibly a “second Kuiper Belt” that lies ahead.
Thus, following its intriguing discoveries of trans-Neptunian objects like the famous binary asteroid Arrokoth, this NASA spacecraft promises to help humanity capture images of even more distant objects.
Most importantly, the evidence it has gathered about the new object belt suggests that the structure of the Solar System may be more complex than we thought, with a new belt potentially larger than the massive Kuiper Belt surrounding it.
In fact, the journey of this extraordinary NASA spacecraft indicates that humanity has yet to fully understand the Kuiper Belt. Initially, this belt was believed to extend up to about 44 AU.
However, New Horizons surpassed the 50 AU mark in 2021 and still has not truly escaped this belt.
Before New Horizons, which left Earth in 2006, there were two twin spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, that flew through this region.
Currently, the Voyager duo—launched in 1977—has traveled much farther than New Horizons, having escaped the heliosphere, meaning they have left the Sun’s gravitational influence.
However, the advantage of New Horizons—nearly 30 years younger than the Voyager duo—is that it is equipped with more sophisticated scientific instruments and travels significantly faster.
Therefore, this NASA spacecraft is expected to reveal additional special details about the dark, cold space at the edge of the Solar System, including things that the Voyager duo may have missed.
According to NASA, New Horizons has enough energy to operate until at least 2040, and they expect that by the end of this decade or the early 2030s, it could fly beyond the heliopause, entering interstellar space.
