ASTEROID BELT
General Information
The vast majority of asteroids in the Solar System are found in a region between Mars and Jupiter. They form the Asteroid Belt. Other asteroids orbit in near-Earth Space and a few migrate or are thrown out to the outer solar system by gravitational interactions. The four largest asteroids in the Asteroid Belt are Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. They contain half the entire belt. The rest of the mass is contained in countless smaller bodies. There was a theory once that if you combined all the asteroids they would make up the missing 'Fifth' rocky planet. The distance from the Asteroid Belt is between 2.8 AU (Astronomical Units) from the Sun and it is about 1 AU thick. The average distance between objects in the Asteroid Belt is quite large. If you could stand on an asteroid and look around, the next one would be too far away to see very well.
Fun Facts
- The Asteroid Belt was discovered in 1801.
- It is in the shape of a Disk.
- They are made up of rock and metal and are irregularly shaped.
- The size of objects within the Asteroid Belt range from being as small as a dust particle to almost 1000 km wide.The largest is Ceres and it is the only Dwarf Planet in Asteroid Belt.
- Astronomers used to believe that objects within the asteroid belt were remnants of a planet smaller than Earth's Moon that had exploded.
- Gravitational forces can throw asteroids out of the belt and send them towards the inner Solar System.
"By looking far into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang"
~Carl Sagan
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