NASA spacecraft lost in strange space at the edge of the Solar System

What NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountered may hint at a hidden structure in the coldest, darkest reaches of the Solar System.

According to previous theories, if a spacecraft travels far enough away from the Sun, it will stumble into a region crowded with icy objects. That is the Kuiper Belt, a giant structure where the "former planet" Pluto resides.

Over the past few years, the spacecraft has been passing through that dense mass of objects and is very lonely. But it has not escaped the Kuiper Belt as we thought.

NASA spacecraft encounters surprise while exploring the Solar System's Kuiper Belt - (Graphic image: ESO).

According to Science Alert , an international research team has just combined data from the New Horizons spacecraft and the Subaru telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan located in Hawaii (USA) and realized that the Kuiper Belt may have up to 2 layers.

The Kuiper Belt extends from the orbit of Neptune, about 30 astronomical units (AU, the average distance between Earth and the Sun) from the Sun.

At about 50 AU from the Sun, NASA's spacecraft entered a more deserted region of space, and from 55 AU it was almost alone.

At the time of writing, NASA's spacecraft was at a distance of 60 AU . But additional observations from Subaru show that it will continue to be surrounded by numerous objects from the 70-90 AU mark.

Our Kuiper Belt has long seemed small compared to similar structures in many other planetary systems, according to Dr. Wesley Fraser of the National Research Council of Canada, a member of the research team.

New results show that it's not small, we simply don't understand it yet.

The gap NASA spacecraft is in isn't the end of the ring, but a hidden structure we've never seen before. The gap divides the ring into two, something that's been seen in other star systems.

" The primordial solar nebula is much larger than previously thought, and this could have implications for studying planet formation," said co-author Fumi Yoshida of the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan.