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The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oort cloud objects. About 60% of the main belt mass is contained in the four ...
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 ...
- 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...
We discuss the current state of research on the size–frequency distribution, the ages of asteroids, and the implications on the formation of asteroids. We review planetesimal formation theory, specifically focusing on the initial sizes of primordial planetesimals.
Apr 1, 2011 · Comets and asteroids have traditionally been considered two distinct separate populations of small bodies in the solar system, according to their different dynamical, observational, and compositional characteristics. The discovery of a new class of objects, the so-called, Main Belt Comets (MBCs), exhibiting a clear cometary activity but having ...
- Ivano Bertini
- 2011
Jan 1, 2014 · Once its eccentricity reaches a value of about 0.3, a main-belt asteroid's orbit begins to approach or even cross the orbit of Mars. Close encounters with Mars can further alter its orbit, leading to interactions with the other inner planets or with Jupiter, which eventually results in a collision with either a planet or the Sun, or ejection ...
Jan 10, 2012 · 1. Main belt comets: a new class of objects. The main belt comets (MBCs) are a recently discovered class of objects, composed until now by only four objects (Table 1). These objects are puzzling because they are orbiting in the main belt on stable orbits, with Tisserand invariant with respect to Jupiter higher than 3, but at the same time they ...
