NASA Hits Its New Year’s Target at the Edge of the Solar System
As partygoers downed champagne, a spacecraft swept past a mysterious object 4 billion miles from Earth.
Updated at 9:58 a.m. ET on January 2, 2019
After Pluto was discovered, in 1930, astronomers wondered whether the solar system stopped there. For decades, they peered through their best telescopes, searching for hints of more objects in the darkness. In the early 1990s, when telescope technology became powerful enough, they found one. The object was thousands of times fainter than Pluto, but it was there. A few months later, they found another. And then another. And another. With each new discovery, the edges of the solar system expanded.
More than have been found in this cold, dark region, known as the Kuiper Belt, named for an astronomer who
