WARM BEGINNING

WARM BEGINNING 

Dwarf planet Pluto and other large objects in the Kuiper belt may have started off with liquid oceans which slowly froze over time

The plate tectonics of Pluto and hence its surface features would be different if it initially had a ‘cold start’ or a ‘hot start’

Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System

The precise origins of the Kuiper belt and its complex structure are still unclear 

Kuiper belt is thought to consist of planetesimals, fragments from the original protoplanetary disc around the Sun that failed to fully coalesce into planets and instead formed into smaller bodies 

Kuiper belt stretches from roughly 30 to 55 AU

Kuiper belt is quite thick

It consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed

Analysis indicates that Kuiper belt objects are composed of a mixture of rock and a variety of ices such as water, methane, and ammonia

Temperature of the belt is only about 50 K

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

The presence of Neptune has a profound effect on the Kuiper belt's structure due to orbital resonances

 

Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not predict its existence. In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) since Pluto and Charon

Astronomers sometimes use the alternative name Edgeworth–Kuiper belt to credit Edgeworth, and KBOs are occasionally referred to as EKOs

KBOs are sometimes called "kuiperoids", a name suggested by Clyde Tombaugh

Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the Kuiper belt, and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc 

The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)

Scattered disc is dynamically active and the Kuiper belt relatively dynamically stable, the scattered disc is now seen as the most likely point of origin for periodic comets 

Being distant from the Sun and major planets, Kuiper belt objects are thought to be relatively unaffected by the processes that have shaped and altered other Solar System objects; thus, determining their composition would provide substantial information on the makeup of the earliest Solar System.