LMR-150 · Planets
Kuiper Belt
Beyond Neptune, a cold ring of ancient ice — and Pluto's neighborhood.
§ A first look
§ Depths
Six ways into the same idea — from bedtime story to chalkboard. No order required.
L1 · Crayon
Told like a bedtime story.
For a curious 10-year-old. No jargon. Just a picture in your head.
Past Neptune, way out beyond the last 'big' planet, is a wide dark ring of frozen worlds left over from when the solar system was first forming. Pluto lives there. So do thousands of other icy bodies, some smaller than Pluto, some bigger. New Horizons flew past one of them in 2019 — a weird little snowman-shaped relic from 4.5 billion years ago that nobody had even known about a few years prior. The outer solar system is, frankly, full of surprises and we have only scratched the inventory.
§ Strange but true
- 01The universe is stranger than your intuition. This is a rule, not an exception.
- 02Every fact in physics was once an outrageous guess. Most still feel like one.
- 03If it doesn't bend your brain a little, you haven't read it carefully enough.
§ From the field journal
Kuiper Belt
"Beyond Neptune, a cold ring of ancient ice — and Pluto's neighborhood."
— observed, sketched, not yet fully understood.
§ Nearby