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Asteroids
Asteroids, or planetoids, are rocks larger than meteorites but smaller than planets that orbit around the Sun.
1,071 Questions
When was the last time a large rock from space or an asteroid hit earth?
The Earth has been hit by asteroids many times before and will be in the future.
The most well-known impact was about 65 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs.
The last major impact was in 1908, the Tunguska event, which occurred in Siberia, Russia.
The Earth's atmosphere is "hit" by an asteroid with as much power as the Hiroshima atomic bomb about once a year but they are annihilated because of the heat and pressure.
Note: This answer is about asteroids, not meteoroids or comets.
Why didn't the asteroids form a planet?
A solar system starts out as a star surrounded by a "proto-planetary disk", a huge flat disk of gas, dust and rock, all attracted to the stars large gravity.
Over time, large objects in the disk attract dust and rock to themselves. They get bigger and bigger and... eventually you get a planet. Objects that attracted mostly gas formed gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, objects that attracted mostly rock formed rocky planets like Earth and Mars.
Asteroids are basically what was left over, what didn't form planets. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is actually the remains of a "proto-planet" that didn't quite stick together in the formation of the solar system. It got ripped apart by Jupiter's gravity.
How are planets asteroids and comets orbits alike?
Rock and/or metallic solids - virtually 100% for a typical asteroid, and a goodly amount (some astronomers think more than half) in a cometary nucleus. They also share in common the fact that they orbit around the sun.
Which planets did they find an asteroid belt between?
The asteroid belt is found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
What are the asteroids the follow and precede Jupiter in a gravitational well called?
The asteroids that follow Jupiter in its orbit are called Trojans, while the ones that precede Jupiter are referred to as Greeks. These asteroids orbit the Sun in two distinct swarms located around the Lagrange points of Jupiter's orbit.
Which planets are known as the rocky planets?
Here in our own solar system, the four inner planets are rocky; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
Beyond our solar system, we've detected over a thousand planets, but we're unable to discover any details about the surface. As far away as they are, I'm still amazed that we can discover that they exist!
How big does an asteroid have to be to survive burn up on entry through the atmosphere?
An asteroid typically needs to be at least 25 meters in diameter to survive entry through the Earth's atmosphere and hit the surface. Smaller asteroids usually burn up and disintegrate due to the intense heat and pressure generated during atmospheric entry.
Which two planets does Main Asteroid Belt go between?
Most of the asteroids within our solar system can be found within the Asteroid Belt. Located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt consists of millions of individual asteroids of varying sizes - from a speck of dust to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The largest object within the belt is a dwarf planet - Ceres - which has a mass of 9.47x1020kg and a diameter of 476.2km.
What effect did the asteroid have 0n earth?
The asteroid impact caused mass extinction of the dinosaurs and approximately 75% of all species on Earth. It resulted in wildfires, tsunamis, and a dramatic shift in the Earth's climate due to dust and debris blocking sunlight, leading to a long period of darkness and cold known as the "impact winter."
Why are asteroids only found between Mars and Jupiter?
Asteroids are found mainly between Mars and Jupiter in the region known as the asteroid belt because the gravitational pull of Jupiter prevented the material in this region from forming a planet. Instead, the leftover debris accumulated to form asteroids. The gravitational influence of Jupiter's massive size helped to scatter the material and prevent a planet from forming in this region.
Rock fragment traveling in space are called?
Rock fragments traveling in space are called meteoroids. When a meteoroid enters Earth's atmosphere and burns up, it creates a streak of light known as a meteor or shooting star. If any part of the meteoroid survives and reaches the Earth's surface, it becomes known as a meteorite.
What effects did asteroid have on the earth?
An asteroid impact can have significant effects on Earth, including causing widespread destruction, tsunamis, wildfires, and a "nuclear winter" effect due to dust blocking sunlight. It can also lead to mass extinctions and long-term changes in the climate and ecosystems. Additionally, asteroid impacts can release energy equivalent to large nuclear explosions and create craters of varying sizes.
The asteroid belt is located between the orbits of what planets?
The asteroid belt is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
What the location of the asteroid belt?
Today, most astronomers believe that the asteroids are remnants of the protoplanetary disk. The remnants failed to merge into a planet because of large gravitational perturbations induced by Jupiter during the formative period of the solar system.
The strong gravitational influence ensured that the remnants couldn't form a large enough "block" before being torn back apart.
However in the 1800's it was wildly believed that a planet [Phaeton] had existed where the asteroids are and it's destruction was caused by :-
- it veered too close to Jupiter and was torn apart by it's powerful gravity.
- it was struck by another large celestial body.
- it was destroyed by a hypothetical brown dwarf, the companion star to the Sun known as Nemesis.
- it was shattered by some internal catastrophe.
This theory has been rejected for a number of reasons.
- The amount of energy required to completely destroy a planet.
- The low mass of the asteroid belt.
- The asteroids have different chemical composition, which should all be the same if they came from the same body.
How much mass of the asteroid belt does Ceres take up?
Yes. Ceres is the only dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt.
What relationship does the asteroid belt and the sun have?
The asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is primarily attracted by the gravitational pull of the Sun. The Sun's gravity influences the motion of the asteroids within the belt, keeping them in relatively stable orbits.
How old is the asteroid Ceres?
Ceres is pretty much the same age as most other objects in the solar system: about 4.6 billion years.
The asteroid belt is located between the orbits are called?
Most of the asteroids within our solar system can be found within the Asteroid Belt. Located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt consists of millions of individual asteroids of varying sizes - from a speck of dust to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The largest object within the belt is a dwarf planet - Ceres - which has a mass of 9.47x1020kg and a diameter of 476.2km.
How was the earth affected by the asteroid?
If you are referring to the Asteroid that hit the Earth 64.8 million years ago, It decimated the existing dinosaurs and killed off many of the existing life forms on our planet.
How did the asteroid kill the dinosaurs?
The likely mechanism by which an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, was that the very large impact threw a large amount of dust and particulate matter into the atmosphere, which then blocked out the sunlight long enough to disrupt the existing food chain.
Where is the asteroid belt located between?
Most of the asteroids within our solar system can be found within the Asteroid Belt. Located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt consists of millions of individual asteroids of varying sizes - from a speck of dust to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The largest object within the belt is a dwarf planet - Ceres - which has a mass of 9.47x1020kg and a diameter of 476.2km.
What is the colliding planetesimals theory?
The interaction of earth-orbiting and Sun-orbiting planetesimals (very large chunks of rocks like asteroids) early in the history of the Solar System led to their breakup. The Moon condensed from this debris.
Is the sun bigger than an asteroid?
Generally speaking yes. The largest asteroid is probably Ceres with a radius of about 490 kilometers. A "normal" star like our Sun has a radius of around 696 million kilometers. while some stars are 200 times as large as our Sun. However, there are certain stars that are smaller than Ceres. A typical neutron star has a radius of only 12 kilometers, and a small back hole can have a radius of only 30 kilometers.
A micro black hole (hypothetical in existence will only have a radius of about 0.1 mm!!!!
Do comets come from the asteroid belt?
Comets are believed to have two sources. Long-period comets (those which take more than 200 years to complete an orbit around the Sun) originate from the Oort Cloud. Short-period comets (those which take less than 200 years to complete an orbit around the Sun) originate from the Kuiper Belt. Danish astronomer Jan Oort proposed that comets reside in a huge cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. This has come to be known as the Oort Cloud. Statistics imply that it may contain as many as a trillion comets and may account for a significant fraction of the mass of the solar system. However, since the individual comets are so small and so far away, we have no direct evidence about the actual existence of the Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the Sun. The Belt contains many icy bodies which can become comets. Occasionally the orbit of a Kuiper Belt object will be disturbed by gravitational interactions with the giant planets in such a way as to cause the object to take up an orbit that crosses into the inner solar system. Although the Oort Cloud is much farther away from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt, it appears that the Oort Cloud objects were formed closer to the Sun than the Kuiper Belt objects. Small objects formed near the giant planets would have been ejected from the solar system by gravitational encounters. Those that didn't escape entirely formed the distant Oort Cloud. Small objects that formed farther out had no such interactions, and remained as the Kuiper Belt objects.
Between what two planets does the asteroid belt lie?
Most of the asteroids within our solar system can be found within the Asteroid Belt. Located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt consists of millions of individual asteroids of varying sizes - from a speck of dust to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The largest object within the belt is a dwarf planet - Ceres - which has a mass of 9.47x1020kg and a diameter of 476.2km.
