Our solar system map may need an update — the Kuiper belt could be way bigger

, is encountering a cosmic dust storm that hints there may be more going on in the outermost reaches of the

Beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Scattered Disk, populated by KBOs that have been scattered from the Kuiper Belt by gravitational tides coming from the solar system's outermost planet,. Objects in the Scattered Disk tend to have highly elliptical orbits that are steeply inclined to the plane of the solar system and can go out to hundreds of AU's from the sun. One AU, or astronomical unit, is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun.

"New Horizons is making the first direct measurements of interplanetary dust far beyond Neptune and Pluto, so every observation could lead to a discovery," astronomer Alex Doner of the University of Colorado, Boulder said in a One possibility is that the excess dust was actually produced closer to the sun and was blown out of the Kuiper Belt thanks to the pressure of sunlight acting on the particles. However, Doner's team has deemed this theory unlikely. Instead, a more enticing possibility is favored, they say.

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