Beyond Neptune · roughly 30–50 AU
Kuiper Belt
A distant, thick disc of icy bodies. Pluto and Arrokoth are two of the objects visited by New Horizons.
The Kuiper Belt contains populations with different orbital histories, including resonant and classical objects. It is a thick disc, not a solid ring.
Objects on strongly scattered orbits can travel much farther out. Eris is listed separately from the classical belt in this collection. The surrounding Oort Cloud is more distant and remains a proposed population.
Understand this region
The Kuiper Belt is not the Oort CloudSeparate the observed populations beyond Neptune from the much more distant proposed Oort Cloud, and compare what New Horizons learned at two targets. · 3 minExplore individual objects
4 objects in this atlas’s reviewed selection; this is not the region’s entire population.
The 3D population is schematic. Dots do not represent measured positions, density or individual tracked asteroids.
NASA · region reference ↗