Dwarf planets, asteroids and the Kuiper Belt

Beyond Neptune the solar system keeps going, and it stops being flat. These worlds travel on orbits that are long, tilted and lopsided — Eris swings between 38 and 98 AU, Sedna far further still.

Seeing them mapped in three dimensions makes the point that a textbook diagram cannot: the outer solar system is not a tidy set of rings.

Dwarf planets, asteroids and the Kuiper Belt — all 69 objects

• 16 Psyche — A metal-rich world that may be the exposed iron core of a shattered baby planet — or a jumble of metal and…
• 2024 YR4 — The asteroid that briefly topped the impact-risk charts in early 2025, when its chance of hitting Earth in…
• 3I/ATLAS — The third interstellar object ever found, and the fastest: a comet from another star system that swept…
• 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko — The duck-shaped comet that ESA’s Rosetta orbited for two years, dropping the Philae lander onto its surface.
• Achlys — An elongated plutino locked in Neptune’s 2:3 resonance, accompanied by a small moon.
• Apophis — Apophis will pass safely close to Earth in April 2029. Its irregular body is reconstructed from radar…
• Arrokoth — A pristine snowman from the dawn of the solar system: two icy lobes that drifted together gently 4.5 billion…
• Aya — A red-hued classical Kuiper Belt object, large enough that it may be nearly round.
• Bennu — A spinning-top rubble pile, mapped to centimeters by OSIRIS-REx before it grabbed a handful of the surface…
• Borisov — The first comet confirmed to come from another star, found by an amateur astronomer in 2019.
• Ceres — The largest object in the asteroid belt and the first asteroid ever discovered. Bright salt deposits glitter…
• Chariklo — The largest known centaur and the first small body found with rings: two thin, dense bands spotted when…
• Chiminigagua — A scattered-disc world flung onto a wide orbit, trailed by a faint little moon.
• Chiron — Half asteroid, half comet: the first centaur ever found wanders between Saturn and Uranus and sometimes…
• DeeDee — “Distant Dwarf” — a faint, far-flung world so remote its light takes over twelve hours to reach us.
• Didymos — The larger member of the asteroid pair visited by DART. This model preserves the mission’s reconstructed…
• Dimorphos — The small asteroid moon struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft. Its detailed mesh is reconstructed from images…
• Dinkinesh — Lucy’s first asteroid turned out to have a moon — and the moon, Selam, turned out to be two lobes touching.
• Donaldjohanson — Lucy’s second flyby target turned out bigger and stranger than expected: an elongated, two-lobed body about…
• Encke — The second comet ever found to return, after Halley’s, and the quickest of the famous ones: it laps the Sun…
• Eris — The discovery that demoted Pluto. Slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto, this frozen world wrapped in…
• Eros — The first asteroid ever orbited and landed on. NEAR Shoemaker touched down on this peanut-shaped world in…
• Eurybates — The largest piece of an ancient collision in Jupiter’s leading Trojan swarm. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flies…
• Gaspra — The first asteroid ever seen up close. Galileo flew past this stony, angular fragment in 1991 on its way to…
• Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà — A very red scattered-disc body named from Juǀʼhoan folklore, circled by its small dark moon.
• Goibniu — A mid-sized classical Kuiper Belt object on a gently inclined, near-circular orbit.
• Gonggong — One of the reddest large bodies known, slathered in tholins and possibly old water-ice frost.
• Hale–Bopp — The Great Comet of 1997, probably the most widely seen comet of the 20th century. It stayed visible to the…
• Halley — The comet that proved comets return. Recorded since 240 BC, painted into the Bayeux Tapestry, and waiting…
• 103P/Hartley 2 — A hyperactive little peanut of a comet: EPOXI flew past in 2010 and found it spitting golf-ball-sized…
• Haumea — The fastest-spinning large body in the solar system. Whirling once every four hours, it has been stretched…
• Hygiea — A dark, carbon-rich world big enough to have pulled itself almost round. VLT images in 2019 found it nearly…
• Ida — A cratered, 60-km-long potato that gave us the first confirmed asteroid moon: images from Galileo’s 1993…
• Itokawa — The sea-otter-shaped rubble pile that gave humanity its first asteroid sample, returned by Japan’s Hayabusa…
• Ixion — A reddish plutino that briefly held the title of largest known Kuiper Belt object after Pluto.
• Kamoʻoalewa — Earth’s quasi-satellite: a tiny asteroid that orbits the Sun in step with us, seeming to loop around Earth…
• Kleopatra — An elongated asteroid with two known moons. The displayed body is a historical radar reconstruction from the…
• Leucus — A dark Trojan asteroid that turns only once every 18½ days, one of the slowest spinners known.
• Lutetia — Rosetta flew past this large, irregular asteroid in July 2010. This is the archived shape reconstructed from…
• Makemake — A reddish, methane-frosted world named for the creator god of the Rapa Nui. The second-brightest Kuiper Belt…
• Máni — A large, solitary Kuiper Belt world — among the biggest known to have no moon of its own.
• Mathilde — A coal-dark rubble pile scarred by giant craters up to 33 km wide. NEAR Shoemaker flew past in 1997 and…
• NEOWISE — The bright comet of summer 2020, its twin tails visible to the naked eye even from city outskirts.
• Orcus — Nicknamed the anti-Pluto: it shares Pluto’s exact 2:3 dance with Neptune but always sits on the opposite…
• Orus — A large, dark Trojan named after a Greek warrior of the Iliad, sharing Jupiter’s orbit about 60° ahead of…
• ʻOumuamua — The first known visitor from another star system, spotted in 2017 as it raced away from the Sun.
• Pallas — The second asteroid ever found, on an orbit tilted so steeply that no spacecraft has visited it.
• Patroclus — Two near-twin worlds locked in orbit around each other, trailing Jupiter in its Trojan swarm.
• Phaethon — A “rock comet” that swoops far inside Mercury’s orbit, where the Sun bakes it hot enough to crack rock.
• Pluto — A world of nitrogen glaciers and water-ice mountains, with a heart-shaped plain photographed by New Horizons…
• Polymele — The smallest of Lucy’s Trojan targets, about 21 km across. Astronomers watching it pass in front of a star…
• Pons–Brooks — A periodic comet famous for its outbursts: in 2023 one gave its coma a horned shape, earning it the nickname…
• 2005 QU182 — A bright, icy scattered-disc object on a wildly eccentric orbit that swings deep into the outer dark.
• Quaoar — A Kuiper Belt world circled by a ring so far out that the debris should have coalesced into a moon — but…
• Ritona — A reddish classical KBO out beyond Neptune, one of many siblings on quiet, near-circular paths.
• Rumina — A scattered-disc object on a long, stretched orbit reaching far beyond the classical Kuiper Belt.
• Ryugu — A dark, spinning-top asteroid sampled by Hayabusa2. Its terrain comes from the mission’s reconstructed…
• Salacia — A dim, dark world named for the Roman goddess of the sea. Its low reflectivity and density make it a…
• Sedna — One of the most distant known worlds, on an orbit so vast a single year lasts over eleven millennia.
• Šteins — A small asteroid encountered by Rosetta in September 2008. Explore the mission-derived shape with its large…
• Swift–Tuttle — The parent of the Perseid meteor shower: every August, Earth ploughs through the dust it has shed.
• 9P/Tempel 1 — The first comet humanity ever punched: NASA’s Deep Impact slammed a copper slug into it on 4 July 2005 to…
• Toutatis — A tumbling, irregular near-Earth asteroid. The displayed model is reconstructed from radar echoes and uses a…
• Tsuchinshan–ATLAS — The great comet of October 2024, which blazed low in the evening twilight with a striking anti-tail.
• Uni — A Kuiper Belt riddle: it and its moon are so under-dense they appear to be mostly porous ice and rubble.
• Varda — A classical Kuiper Belt world named for a Tolkien deity, orbited by its moon Ilmarë.
• Varuna — A fast-spinning Kuiper Belt object whirling so quickly it has been stretched into an elongated ellipsoid.
• Vesta — The brightest asteroid in our sky and nearly a protoplanet: it has an iron core, a basaltic crust, and a…
• 81P/Wild 2 — The comet we brought home: Stardust flew through its coma in 2004, caught the dust in aerogel, and…

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