Space & Astronomy

Scientists discover a second anomalous 'kernel' in the Kuiper Belt

By T.K. Randall
November 22, 2025 ·  1 comment

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) You might be forgiven for thinking that our solar system doesn't extend much further out than the orbit of Neptune, but in actual fact, beyond this outermost gas giant lies an enormous region known as the Kuiper Belt which is filled with small icy and rocky bodies (including several known dwarf planets).

The Kuiper Belt spans a vast region, from about 30 to 50 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

It is perhaps not unexpected, then, that this vast, cold region might harbor a few secrets of its own.

Now, in a new paper, scientists outline how they used a clustering algorithm known as Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to search for parts of the Kuiper Belt in which the density of objects differs anomalously compared to the surrounding region.

What they found were two such areas - one, nicknamed the kernel, that had previously been discovered some years ago and another, the inner kernel, situated next to it.Both are located at a distance of around 43-44 astronomical units.

"The discovery of the inner kernel, described here, was achieved by using DBSCAN in a conditional manner-requiring that DBSCAN recover the kernel, and asking whether in those cases it simultaneously identified any other cluster(s)," the team wrote.

"However, removing this condition, it is unclear whether the inner kernel and the kernel are a single, combined structure, or actually two distinct ones."

Exactly how these 'kernels' came to form continues to remain unclear - one possibility is that the material clumped up due to the migration of Neptune's orbit.

As things stand, though, we will need to wait for more data to find out for sure.

Source: Phys.org | Comments (1)

Tags: Kuiper Belt