What are facts about asteriods?

Answer 1

The asteroid belt is a region of our solar system between Mars and Jupiter, where a conglomeration of numerous rocky and icy planetesimals have formed a ringlike structure that encircles the sun.

One theory is that the gravity of Jupiter was powerful enough to inhibit these rocky bodies from accreting (gathering) into a single planet. As a result, the only body in the belt large enough to qualify as even a minor planet is the dwarf planet Ceres.

It's likely that the vast majority of the non-cometary rocky and icy bodies found in the Kuiper Belt, the Scattered Disk, and the Oort Cloud (all of which are found beyond the orbit of Neptune) probably qualify as either asteroids or minor planets. So it's possible to conceive of these structures as being asteroid belts as well, albeit ones that are not nearly so densely packed as the one in the inner solar system.

The planetoid belts--the Kuiper and the Main--actually have 2 belts each. Their origin is unknown because no model of planetary formation has been proven. The currently accepted model has no explanation for the twinning of Venus-Earth and Uranus-Neptune and has other serious problems with it. Also, a body that is not a planet can't be called a planet, whether dwarf or minor or otherwise.

Answer 2

It is in between Mars and Jupiter.It's made of particles in space clumped together.
that they seperate the inner planets and outer planets, and it is made out of astriods and comets.
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I erased the facts cuz the answers were kinda lame like they like apples... Bleh

Answer 3

The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The asteroid belt region is also termed the main belt to distinguish it from other concentrations of minor planets within the Solar System, such as the Kuiper belt and scattered disc. More than half the mass of the main belt is contained in the four largest objects: Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea. All of these have mean diameters of more than 400 km, while Ceres, the main belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that multiple unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, and these can form an asteroid family whose members have similar orbital characteristics and compositions. Collisions also produce a fine dust that forms a major component of the zodiacal light. Individual asteroids within the main belt are categorized by their spectra, with most falling into three basic groups: carbonaceous (C-type), silicate (S-type), and metal-rich (M-type). The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals, the smaller precursors of the planets. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from the giant planet imbued the planetesimals with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, and instead of sticking together, the planetesimals shattered. As a result, most of the main belt's mass has been lost since the formation of the Solar System. Some fragments can eventually find their way into the inner Solar System, leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter. At these orbital distances, a Kirkwood gap occurs as they are swept into other orbits. In 1802, shortly after discovering Pallas, Heinrich Olbers suggested to William Herschel that Ceres and Pallas were fragments of a much larger planet that once occupied the Mars-Jupiter region, this planet having suffered an internal explosion or a cometary impact many million years before. Over time however, this hypothesis has fallen from favor. The large amount of energy that would have been required to destroy a planet, combined with the belt's low combined mass, which is only about 4% of the mass of the Earth's Moon, do not support the hypothesis. Further, the significant chemical differences between the asteroids are difficult to explain if they come from the same planet. Today, most scientists accept that, rather than fragmenting from a progenitor planet, the asteroids never formed a planet at all. In general in the Solar System, planetary formation is thought to have occurred via a process comparable to the long-standing nebular hypothesis: a cloud of interstellar dust and gas collapsed under the influence of gravity to form a rotating disk of material that then further condensed to form the Sun and planets. During the first few million years of the Solar System's history, an accretion process of sticky collisions caused the clumping of small particles, which gradually increased in size. Once the clumps reached sufficient mass, they could draw in other bodies through gravitational attraction and become planetesimals. This gravitational accretion led to the formation of the rocky planets and the gas giants. Planetesimals within the region which would become the asteroid belt were too strongly perturbed by Jupiter's gravity to form a planet. Instead they continued to orbit the Sun as before, while occasionally colliding. In regions where the average velocity of the collisions was too high, the shattering of planetesimals tended to dominate over accretion, preventing the formation of planet-sized bodies. Orbital resonances occurred where the orbital period of an object in the belt formed an integer fraction of the orbital period of Jupiter, perturbing the object into a different orbit; the region lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains many such orbital resonances. As Jupiter migrated inward following its formation, these resonances would have swept across the asteroid belt, dynamically exciting the region's population and increasing their velocities relative to each other. During the early history of the Solar System, the asteroids melted to some degree, allowing elements within them to be partially or completely differentiated by mass. Some of the progenitor bodies may even have undergone periods of explosive volcanism and formed magma oceans. However, because of the relatively small size of the bodies, the period of melting was necessarily brief (compared to the much larger planets), and had generally ended about 4.5 billion years ago, in the first tens of millions years of formation. In August 2007, a study of zircon crystals in an Antarctic meteorite believed to have originated from 4 Vesta suggested that it, and by extension the rest of the asteroid belt, had formed rather quickly, within ten million years of the Solar System origin. The asteroids are not samples of the primordial Solar System. They have undergone considerable evolution since their formation, including internal heating (in the first few tens of millions of years), surface melting from impacts, space weathering from radiation, and bombardment by micrometeorites.[25] While some scientists refer to the asteroids as residual planetesimals, other scientists consider them distinct. The current asteroid belt is believed to contain only a small fraction of the mass of the primordial belt. Computer simulations suggest that the original asteroid belt may have contained mass equivalent to the Earth. Primarily because of gravitational perturbations, most of the material was ejected from the belt within about a million years of formation, leaving behind less than 0.1% of the original mass. Since their formation, the size distribution of the asteroid belt has remained relatively stable: there has been no significant increase or decrease in the typical dimensions of the main belt asteroids. The 4:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter, at a radius 2.06 AU, can be considered the inner boundary of the main belt. Perturbations by Jupiter send bodies straying there into unstable orbits. Most bodies formed inside the radius of this gap were swept up by Mars (which has an aphelion at 1.67 AU) or ejected by its gravitational perturbations in the early history of the Solar System. The Hungaria asteroids lie closer to the Sun than the 4:1 resonance, but are protected from disruption by their high inclination. When the main belt was first being formed, the temperatures at a distance of 2.7 AU from the Sun formed a "snow line" below the condensation point of water. Planetesimals formed beyond this radius were able to accumulate ice. In 2006 it was announced that a population of comets had been discovered within the asteroid belt beyond the snow line, which may have provided a source of water for Earth's oceans. According to some models, there was insufficient outgassing of water during the Earth's formative period to form the oceans, necessitating an external source such as a cometary bombardment. Contrary to popular imagery, the asteroid belt is mostly empty. The asteroids are spread over such a large volume that it would be highly improbable to reach an asteroid without aiming carefully. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of asteroids are currently known, and the total number ranges in the millions or more, depending on the lower size cutoff. Over 200 asteroids are known to be larger than 100 km, while a survey in the infrared wavelengths shows that the main belt has 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more. The apparent magnitudes of most of the known asteroids are 11-19, with the median at about 16. The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 3.0×1021-3.6×1021 kilograms, which is just 4% of the Earth's Moon. Its four largest objects, 1 Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas and 10 Hygiea, account for half of the belt's total mass, with almost one-third accounted for by Ceres alone. Ceres's orbital distance, 2.8 AU, is also the location of the asteroid belt's center of mass.

Answer 4

Asteroids are small rocky bodies that orbit the Sun, primarily found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They can range in size from a few meters to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Some asteroids have collided with Earth in the past, causing significant impacts and mass extinctions.

Answer 5

an asteriod belt is something between the inner and outer planets

Answer 6

"Our" asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter, but due to gravitational interaction with other heavenly bodies, individual asteroids could be wandering anywhere in our solar system.

Answer 7

*In the everglades, there was an asteroid impact that made a crater, the size of Conneticut

*the first asteroid was discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi