Courses › The Universe from Scratch › Lesson 3
Beyond Neptune · premieres Friday, October 23
Neptune is not the end of the Solar System. Beyond it lies an enormous, icy territory full of dwarf planets, comets and rocks. Today we're going to travel through it using the real positions of its objects, computed from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory data.
The positions of the dwarf planets and of Halley are real for the chosen date. By contrast, the thousands of rocks in the Kuiper Belt are drawn at random, following their measured structure: they are not real objects one by one. The surface colours are illustration, and the sizes are enlarged so that they show up.
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Uranus's tilt | ~98° | IAU WGCCRE 2009 (Archinal et al. 2011), used by the Solar System template |
| Pluto's diameter | 2,376.6 km | Nimmo et al. 2017 (Icarus 287, 12): mean radius 1,188.3 ± 1.6 km, New Horizons images |
| Pluto–Neptune resonance | 3:2 (plutinos at 39.4 AU) | Outer Solar System template (belt structure) |
| Distances on 4 Oct 2026 | Pluto 35.6 AU; Eris 95.5 AU; Sedna 82.8 AU; Halley 35.2 AU | JPL Small-Body Database elements (Oct 2026), computed by the template |
| Halley's next perihelion | 28 July 2061 | Yeomans and Kiang 1981; JPL ephemerides |
| Oort Cloud | 2,000 to 100,000 AU, never observed | Outer Solar System template (theoretical scheme) |
| Kuiper Belt rocks | Random positions with the real structure | Outer Solar System template (README) |
They are Solaris Core Blender templates, built from measured data. You can download them, change the camera and make your own images.
See templates