Scientists think Arrokoth might hold clues about the formation of our planet and the origin of life on Earth. It is a comet-rich area of our solar system. The Kuiper belt contains the large objects Eris, Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, Quaoar, and many, likely millions, of other smaller bodies. Eris has a small moon named Dysnomia. nstead, Neptune's gravity stirred up this region of space so much that the small, icy objects there weren't able to coalesce into a large planet. There are bits of rock and ice, comets, and dwarf planets. This made it the furthest object yet seen in the Solar System. Most of the objects are small, typically 10-50 km across. Particularly uncertain is the number of small (1–10-km) KBOs if this region of the solar system really is the reservoir for short-period comets.

Arrokoth is the farthest world ever studied up close by a spacecraft. It is one of the largest structures in our solar system, the other being the Oort Cloud, heliosphere, and the magnetosphere of Jupiter. This population also contains objects named kernel, which have semi-major axes at 44 AU – 44.5 AU.

Overlapping the outer edge of the main part of the Kuiper Belt is a second region called the scattered disk, which continues outward to nearly 1,000 AU, with some bodies on orbits that go even farther beyond.

But it wouldn’t have a name if it was all empty space. He speculated that a comet belt that lay between 35 and 50 AU would be required to account for the observed number of comets. The Kuiper Belt is still a very mysterious place, and we have a lot to learn about it. In addition to the nominal members of the Kuiper belt described above, there are some KBOs whose closest approach to the Sun leaves them well outside the influence of Neptune. KBOs that have significant gravitational interactions with Neptune are called “scattering KBOs.” Scattering KBOs are on orbits that are unstable on million-year timescales. Cold classicals: KBOs drawn from a narrow distribution of orbit inclinations (about 2.6°), with mean orbital distances restricted to 42.5–47.2 AU (6.4 billion–7.1 billion km [4 billion–4.4 billion miles]) and perihelion distances smoothly distributed between 38 AU (5.7 billion km [3.5 billion miles]) and 47.2 AU. Dynamically hot population – They have orbits much more inclined to the ecliptic, by up to 30 degrees. The densest section of the Kuiper Belt is between 42 and 48 AU from the Sun.

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