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This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System. The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System.
- Discovery
- Structure
- Composition
- Families and Groups
- Origin
- Exploration
In 1800, hoping to resolve the issue created by the Titius-Bode Law, astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach recruited 24 of his fellow astronomers into a club known as the “United Astronomical Society” (sometimes referred to the as “Stellar Police”). At the time, its ranks included famed astronomer William Herschel, who had discovered Uranus and its...
Despite common perceptions, the Asteroid Belt is mostly empty space, with the asteroids spread over a large volume of space. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of asteroids are currently known, and the total number ranges in the millions or more. Over 200 asteroids are known to be larger than 100 km in diameter, and a survey in the infrared wavele...
Much like the terrestrial planets, most asteroids are composed of silicate rock while a small portion contains metals such as iron and nickel. The remaining asteroids are made up of a mix of these, along with carbon-rich materials. Some of the more distant asteroids tend to contain more ices and volatiles, which includes water ice. The Main Belt co...
Approximately one-third of the asteroids in the asteroid belt are members of an asteroid family. These are based on similarities in orbital elements – such as semi-major axis, eccentricity, orbital inclinations, and similar spectral features, all of which indicate a common origin. Most likely, this would have involved collisions between larger obje...
Originally, the Asteroid Belt was thought to be the remnants of a much larger planet that occupied the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This theory was originally suggested by Heinrich Olbders to William Herschel as a possible explanation for the existence of Ceres and Pallas. However, this hypothesis has since fallen out of favor for...
The asteroid belt is so thinly populated that several unmanned spacecraft have been able to move through it; either as part of a long-range mission to the outer Solar System, or (in recent years) as a mission to study larger Asteroid Belt objects. In fact, due to the low density of materials within the Belt, the odds of a probe running into an aste...
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Scattered disc. Solar System belts are asteroid and comet belts that orbit the Sun in the Solar System in interplanetary space. [1] [2] The Solar System has both major and minor asteroid and comet belts in the inner Solar System. The Solar System is unique in that it has multiple belts.
The Kirkwood gaps are visible in the main belt. A Kirkwood gap is a gap or dip in the distribution of the semi-major axes (or equivalently of the orbital periods) of the orbits of main-belt asteroids. They correspond to the locations of orbital resonances with Jupiter .
Feb 28, 2019 · The Main Belt: A Gateway to the Formation and Early Evolution of the Solar System | Planetary News. Workshop, Sardinia, Italy | June 4-7, 2019. The Main Asteroid Belt is at the boundary of the inner and outer solar system. It marks a transition region from the rocky volatile-poor inner terrestrial planets to the outer gaseous and icy giant planets.
The asteroid field known as the main belt is a large collection of objects that are in orbit between Jupiter and Mars. The largest known asteroid in the belt is Ceres which accounts for 27% of the ...
Main-belt asteroids. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Main Belt asteroids. 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt. If possible, asteroids should always be placed into one of the numerous sub-categories, in line with the category information given in the minor-planet catalog.
