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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 ...
- 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...
Main-belt asteroid families. Within the main belt are groups of asteroids that cluster with respect to certain mean orbital elements (semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination). Such groups are called families and are named for the lowest numbered asteroid in the family.
inner main-belt (a < 2.5 AU) intermediate main-belt (2.5 AU < a < 2.82 AU) outer main-belt (a > 2.82 AU) A plot of inner solar system asteroids and planets as of 2006 May 9, in a manner that exposes the Kirkwood gaps. Similar to the position plot, planets (with trajectories) are orange, Jupiter being the outer most in this view.
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).
Category. : Main-belt asteroids. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Main Belt asteroids. 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. Used sources: Small Body Data Ferret (Nesvorný) and AstDys (Milani and Knežević).
Other articles where main-belt asteroid is discussed: asteroid: Distribution and Kirkwood gaps: …AU, a region called the main belt. The mean distances are not uniformly distributed but exhibit population depletions, or “gaps.” Those so-called Kirkwood gaps are due to mean-motion resonances with Jupiter’s orbital period. An asteroid with a mean distance from the Sun of 2.50 AU, for ...
