Kuiper Belt Quotes

I like to think of our tiny speck-of-dust Earth wrapped inside its snug little Kuiper belt, cocooned somewhere inside the massive Oort cloud, completely undetectable inside a universe so massive there is no comparison. And here we are, living and dying, completely unaware of all that lies beyond. Terrifying, but also comforting, especially when things happen that are hard to understand.

It was becoming more and more clear that if the asteroids were the schools of minnows swimming among the pod of whales, then Pluto and the Kuiper belt objects were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea.

AMAZONGOOGLEFACE ANNOUNCES INTENT TO ACQUIRE DISNEYAPPLESOFT The deal would result in a combined company worth approximately $97.3 quadrillion. "This will be good for consumers," said Jeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonGoogleFace, speaking from the company's offices on an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper belt is the source of what are known as short-period comets—those that come past pretty regularly—of which the most famous is Halley’s comet. The more reclusive long-period comets (among them the recent visitors Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake) come from the much more distant Oort cloud, about which more presently.

The human mind is grown inside a 0.0013 cubic meters crystalline calcium phosphate box on the 149 million km2 rocky surface of a 510 million km2 planet that is falling in a straight line over curved space at 108,000 kilometres per hour inside the gravity well of a 6 trillion km2 star on a 250 million year sojourn around the centre of a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and trillions of planets and moons. The immediate solar system appears to end at the Kuiper Belt, its outer edge a mind-stunning 7 billion kilometres away, yet the outermost reach of the Heliosphere is still another 5 billion kilometres further out. The furthest object, however, within the Sun’s gravity well, Sedna, marks the solar system’s diameter to in fact be a sense-jarring 287 billion kilometres in length.

THE SHEER COMPLEXITY OF PLUTO The diversity of phenomena seen on Pluto was far beyond what anyone, even New Horizons team members, expected to find on such a small planet so cold and far from the Sun. Ground fogs, high-altitude hazes, possible clouds, canyons, towering mountains, faults, polar caps, apparent dune fields, suspected ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence for flowing (and even standing) liquids in the past, and more. This little red planet perched 3 billion miles away in the Kuiper Belt packed more punch than any other known small world explored, and indeed more punch than many much larger worlds. The variety of terrains, its complex interactions between the surface and the atmosphere, and the wide range of surface ages even prompted the New Horizons team to adopt the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars.

As pointed out by David Jewitt, the name “Kuiper belt” then follows Stigler’s law, which states, “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

On an intellectual level, I understood that for most of human history, sex was something to be sought. It was a lure, a prize, and a trophy.  For some it was a compulsion, and for far too many, it was an impossible dream.

Until relatively recently, there was no real need for a term referring in general to the kind of object our Solar System is. It was the only known object of its type. We knew of stars but no planets outside the Solar System. We had no ability to observe planet formation in action. That has all changed, but so recently that there is no generally agreed term in the astronomical community for a star and all the gravitationally bound objects surrounding it. The term ‘planetary system’ has begun to gain currency to describe such objects, and it is the term we adopt to refer to a star and all the bodies gravitationally bound to it—the planets whether rocky, gassy, or icy, their moons, the asteroids, comets, and the far-flung icy bodies that make up Kuiper Belts. Our own planetary system contains only one star, but other planetary systems commonly contain two or even three stars. While the same general processes that formed our Solar System were also operating in the formation of other planetary systems, the end result of the process can yield planetary systems very unlike our own. Now that the Solar System isn’t the only example of a planetary system subject to study, and now that we can in effect peer back in time and observe processes such as those that occurred billions of years ago when our Solar System was being born, we can begin to appreciate how our home planetary system, and indeed our home world, is or isn’t special. The veil has been lifted, and this book provides a glimpse of what has been revealed.

Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moon of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. For this type of object in the Kuiper belt, the rules said that the name had to be a creation deity in a mythology

Neptune's complex migration history, known as the 'jumping Neptune' altered the Kuiper Belt's properties in the ways, all of which have a bearing on the possibility for advanced life and civilization on Earth.

If we humans are nothing else, we are an inquisitive and restless species, explorers at heart. For that reason, we’re also optimistic that even humans will one day travel to the Kuiper Belt to explore it in person, making footfall on Pluto and other Kuiper Belt worlds, as we have already done on the Moon and will soon do on Mars, and then no doubt on many other worlds.

the Kuiper belt, a region of icy asteroids past the orbit of Neptune, drawing an entourage of rocks in its wake and splashing them across the earth. The Kuiper belt contained over thirty thousand asteroids larger than a hundred kilometers in diameter, along with being the home to many short-period comets like the famous Halley’s comet.

Since humans had not even been able to set foot on Mars, any discussion of outer space was meaningless, at least prior to the expiration date of the Space Convention fifty years after it was drafted. But the great powers viewed the Convention as the perfect venue for political theater and amended it with provisions regarding resources outside the Solar System. The amendment provided that the development of natural resources outside the Kuiper Belt, and other economic activities regarding them, had to take place under the auspices of the United Nations. The amendment went into excruciating detail to define “natural resources,” but, basically, the phrase referred to resources not already occupied by nonhuman civilizations. This treaty also offered the first international law definition for “civilization.” Historically, this document was referred to as the Crisis Amendment