Asteroids
posted in Latest News, Outer Space |
Asteroids are small bodies that are supposed to be left over from the beginning of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They are stony objects with round or uneven shapes up to several hundred km across, but most are much smaller.
There are more than 100,000 asteroids lying in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. These asteroids lie in a site in the solar system where there seems to be a jump in the spacing between the planets. Scientists believe that these remains may be the remnants of an early planet, which could have broke up early in the solar system.
Several thousand of the biggest asteroids in this belt have been given names. The probabilities of an asteroid having a collision with Earth are very small! But some do come close to Earth, like Hermes. The closest approach was of 777,000 km.
The region in our solar system, called the Asteroid Belt or Main Belt, possibly contain millions of asteroids ranging extensively in size from Ceres, which are at 940 km in diameter is about one-quarter the diameter of our Moon, to bodies that are less than 1 km across.
As they rotate around the Sun in elliptical orbits, giant Jupiter’s gravity and occasional close meet with Mars or with another asteroid change the asteroids’ orbits, knocking them out of the Main Belt and throwing them into space across the orbits of the planets.