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The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets .
Solar System belts. The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles).
- Asteroids by The Millions
- Distances in The Asteroid Belt
- Asteroids in and Out of The Main Belt
While the graphic may make it seem like the asteroid belt is teeming with debris, if you lumped all the material together it would only create a body smaller than Earth’s moon. The asteroid belt contains objects that vary wildly in size. It has 1 to 2 million asteroids more than half a mile (about a km) across. Plus, the asteroid belt contains unto...
Outer space is vast. And thus, despite there being many millions (possibly billions) of objects in the asteroid belt, the average distance between them is 600,000 miles (about 1 million km). This means that spacecraft can fly through the asteroid belt without colliding with any asteroids. (Although, obviously, a chance collision is never completely...
We often call the asteroid belt the main belt to distinguish it from other, smaller groups of asteroids in the solar system such as the Lagrangians and Centaursin the outer solar system. What scientists once thought was a homogeneous belt they now know to be slightly more complicated. There are different and distinct zones within the main-belt aste...
May 5, 2017 · How did the asteroid belt form? Early in the life of the solar system, dust and rock circling the sun were pulled together by gravity into planets. But not all of the ingredients created new...
Oct 8, 2019 · That is somewhere between 329-478 million km away. The asteroid belt is huge and the space between each of the asteroids is over 600,000 miles. The circumference of Earth is only 24,901.45 miles, which means that the distance between objects in the asteroid belt is more than 24 times the circumference of Earth.
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Where do asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun?
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Main Asteroid Belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, generally with not very elongated orbits. The belt is estimated to contain between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter, and millions of smaller ones.
Scientists continuously monitor Earth-crossing asteroids, whose paths intersect Earth's orbit, and near-Earth asteroids that approach Earth's orbital distance to within about 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) and may pose an impact danger. Radar is a valuable tool in detecting and monitoring potential impact hazards.
