New Horizons: New Horizons Measurements Shed New Light on the Darkness of the Universe

Discovery suggests the solar system may have formed from a much larger protostellar disk, and portends new objects for NASA’s New Horizons to study

The 8.2-meter diameter Subaru Telescope is an optical-infrared telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). A new study authored by the NASA New Horizons Kuiper Belt search team used data collected with the telescope. The study reports the detection of an unexpectedly distant population of Kuiper Belt Objects, suggesting the Solar System may have formed from a much larger protostellar disk than previously believed. (Credit: NAOJ)

A new, peer-reviewed study authored by NASA’s New Horizons Kuiper Belt search team reports the detection of an unexpected population of very distant bodies in the Kuiper Belt, an outer region of our solar system populated by ancient remnants of planetary building blocks lying beyond the orbit of Neptune. The study used data collected with the 8.2-meter diameter Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. New Horizons is the NASA’s spacecraft sent to explore the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt.

The newly detected Kuiper Belt objects reported in the study, published this month in the Planetary Science Journal of the American Astronomical Society, stretch out to almost 90 times as far from the Sun as Earth. A preprint can be found at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.21142

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