Key facts
- Category
- Planetary systems
- Object class
- Circumstellar disk
- Composition
- Icy bodies, dwarf planets, comets, rock and frozen volatiles
Kuiper Belt
16.5 billion kmextent
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
Details
The Kuiper Belt is a broad disk of icy bodies beyond Neptune. It contains dwarf planets such as Pluto and countless smaller frozen objects, preserving material from the early Solar System in a region shaped by Neptune’s gravity and orbital resonances.
The Kuiper Belt is a broad, flattened population of icy bodies beyond Neptune, concentrated roughly between 30 and 50 astronomical units from the Sun. It includes dwarf planets such as Pluto, resonant objects shaped by Neptune and smaller bodies left from the Solar System’s formation.
Its 16.5-billion-kilometer extent represents a useful span of the main belt, not a sharp wall. More weakly bound scattered objects reach farther out, while many short-period comets are supplied by populations dynamically connected to this outer region.
Links
- Universe journey
- Solar System
- Wikipedia
- Kuiper Belt on Wikipedia
Size neighbors
Objects near Kuiper Belt on the scale
On the logarithmic size axis, Kuiper Belt falls between Solar System and M87*. The band uses nearby Planetary systems records.
Shared physical scale
2.42ly
Sources
References for Kuiper Belt
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Kuiper Belt — Wikipedia
- Visual: scaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
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About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.