Kenneth Essex Edgeworth DSO MC (26 February 1880 – 10 October 1972) was an Irish army officer, engineer, economist and independent theoretical astronomer.

His parents were Elizabeth Dupré ((née Wilson) 1852-1929) and land agent Thomas Newcomen Edgeworth (1850–1931) both of Anglo-Irish ancestry.

It had 'Grubb 12-inch' and '24-inch reflectors' which his uncle had acquired from Sir Howard Grubb of Dublin a year after he went on an expedition to Algeria to observe the 1870 total eclipse, at just age 19.

[14][1] After residing at Daramona, Edgeworth's parents moved to Ardglas House and then to Mount Murray, near Lough Owel.

[14] When aged 17, Edgeworth attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, London, where he won the Pollock Medal for best cadet in 1898.

In the First World War he served in Royal Corps of Signals to maintain communications in France, was mentioned in dispatches three times and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Military Cross.

[17] In 1902, Edgeworth's uncle, William E. Wilson, put forward his nephew for election to the Royal Astronomical Society.

He said in 1938 that Pluto (discovered eight years earlier by Clyde Tombaugh) was too small to be a planet but was likely a large example of the original material of the Solar System.

He suggested that there was a huge number of small bodies at a great distance, with infrequent clustering limiting their size but the occasional inward cometary visitor.

However, before this publication, in 1943, Edgeworth wrote a piece for the Journal of the British Astronomical Association which suggested the idea of a vast reservoir of cometary material beyond Neptune's orbit.

Those distant solar bodies included Pluto, Eris (dwarf planet) and Makemake onto the Kuiper belt.

More recently, the Edgeworth – Kuiper belt has influenced many astronomers to read more into the demotion of Pluto as a planet.