Dark bands in the clouds on giant planets: Belts are particular girdles or zones on the surface of the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Measures to reduce expenditures, cut costs, and to eliminate deficits.

1. A ring of small astronomical objects orbiting through the outer solar system, beyond the farthest planets, Neptune and Pluto: It is believed that the Kuiper belt is a source of comets.

2. A disk-shaped swarm of 200 million comets and comet fragments located from just beyond the orbit of Neptune and extending past Pluto: The Kuiper belt was named after Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973), a Dutch-born U.S. astronomer who made extensive studies of the solar system. His discoveries included the atmosphere of the planet Mars and that of Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn.

His spectroscopic studies of Uranus and Neptune led to the discovery of features subsequently named "Kuiper bands", which indicate the presence of methane.

He was an adviser to many NASA exploratory missions, and pioneered the use of telescopes on high-flying aircraft.

A restraining belt attached to a vehicle seat which is fastened around passengers and which is intended to keep a person in place in order to avoid injuries in accidents where the occupant could be thrown against a solid object.

A seat belt improves a passenger's chance of surviving a crash by 50 to 75 percent, mainly by preventing inertia from throwing the person through the windshield. It also spreads the force of an impact over a larger area of the body, making injuries less severe.

A seat belt also stretches which slows the passenger down with less velocity so the body feels less force.

One of two zones of charged particles around the Earth's magnetosphere discovered in 1958 by U.S. physicist Jame Van Allen: Van Allen radiation belts relates to the atomic particles that came from the Earth's upper atmosphere and the solar wind, and are trapped by the Earth's magnetic field.

The inner belt lies above the equator, and contains protons and electrons from the solar wind.

One of the two regions of the Van Allen radiation belts is situated at about 1,900 miles, 3,000 kilometers, and 12,500 miles, 20,000 kilometers, above the equator, in which charged particles, trapped in the Earth's magnetosphere, oscillate between the magnetic poles.

The particles are caught from the solar wind, or produced by collisions between air molecules and cosmic rays.