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Which technological advances allowed astronomers to discover the Kuiper belt?

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Kuiper belt binary object — Kuiper belt An artist's rendition of a binary object in the Kuiper belt. The two objects depicted orbit each other at the edge of the solar system.

The discovery of the Kuiper belt was made possible by the development and availability of large telescopes and sensitive light detectors in the 1990s.1

While the existence of a reservoir of icy bodies beyond Neptune had been hypothesized for decades by astronomers such as Kenneth E. Edgeworth and Gerard P. Kuiper, these objects remained undetected due to their extreme distance and faintness. The breakthrough occurred on August 30, 1992, when astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu utilized the 2.2-meter telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory to conduct a slow-moving objects survey. Their successful identification of (15760) 1992 QB1 confirmed the existence of the belt and demonstrated the feasibility of detecting other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs).21345