Another Kuiper Belt? Mystery zone spotted at the edge of our solar system

Astronomers have found new objects lurking towards the edge of our solar system. The Kuiper Belt that lies beyond Neptune is a cold, ring-shaped field filled with multiple icy bodies. Pluto lives here, and so does Arrokoth and several more bodies.

Known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), astronomers have noticed a rise in the number of these bodies. They are between 70 and 90 astronomical units from the Sun but are much farther away from the inner population of KBOs. The gap is so wide that experts say it appears practically like a whole new Kuiper Belt in itself.

"If this is confirmed, it would be a major discovery," says planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida of the University of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences and Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan.

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To understand the distance between the objects in the Kuiper Belt and the newly discovered bodies, note that the belt itself extends from the orbit of Neptune at around 30 astronomical units from the Sun to about 50 astronomical units from the Sun. An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.

The Kuiper Belt is being constantly studied to know more about the outer regions of our solar system. To date, using the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i, astronomers have found 263 new Kuiper Belt Objects.

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Surprisingly, at least 11 of these new KBOs reside in an area far beyond the region where the belt was thought to end.

The mysterious gap beyond Kuiper

An international team of astronomers led by Wesley Fraser of the National Research Council of Canada found that these objects are out in the region past 70 astronomical units. To put the distance into perspective, know that the New Horizons spacecraft heading into deeper space after conducting a flyby of Pluto in 2015 is currently at nearly 60 astronomical units from the Sun.

Going by the number of these objects spotted, the researchers were able to figure out the density of the outer Kuiper Belt ring which is expected to be lower than the inner population, but high enough to constitute a new structure.

The region between 55 and 70 astronomical units has almost nothing. This gap is a strange discovery for our solar system, but astronomers say this is a regular feature in other forming planetary systems.

"Our Solar System's Kuiper Belt long appeared to be very small in comparison with many other planetary systems, but our results suggest that idea might just have arisen due to an observational bias," Fraser explains.

"So maybe, if this result is confirmed, our Kuiper Belt isn't all that small and unusual after all compared to those around other stars."