Search results
Feb 28, 2019 · This workshop brings together experts to establish the current understanding of Main Belt asteroid science, as well as to debate future directions for investigation. The workshop stimulates discussions about accretion, chemistry, collisions, dynamics, geophysics, and meteorites. The workshop is limited to approximately 100 attendees. Main ...
Language links are at the top of the page. Search. Search
- 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...
Location of the main belt This plot shows the location of the main belt with respect to the planets and the Sun as well as the orbital structure of asteroid inclinations and number density of objects (yellow represents the highest number density, blue the lowest). Figure from DeMeo and Carry (2014).
Phaeton (alternatively Phaethon / ˈ f eɪ. ə θ ən / or Phaëton / ˈ f eɪ. ə t ən /; from Ancient Greek: Φαέθων, romanized: Phaéthōn, pronounced [pʰa.é.tʰɔːn]) was the hypothetical planet hypothesized by the Titius–Bode law to have existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the destruction of which supposedly led to the formation of the asteroid belt (including the ...
Jan 1, 2014 · The P asteroids peak at about 4 AU, and the D asteroids at 5.2 AU; they are probably richer in low-temperature materials such as carbon compounds, complex organics, clays, water, and volatiles and represent the transition between the rocky asteroids of the main belt and the volatile-rich comets in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.
Summary. From the viewpoint of planet formation in the Solar System, Main Belt asteroids are the remnants of the so-called planetesimal population, the building bricks of planets that formed ubiquitously all over the Solar Nebula. Over the last years evidence has grown that planetesimals formed big from the gravitational collapse of a local ...
