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The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars.
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19]
The Kuiper belt (/ ˈ k aɪ p ər / KY-pər) [1] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [2] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive.
Called a "mini-moon" of sorts by some, it temporarily entered Earth's orbit on Sept. 29 from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which follows a similar orbital path around the sun as the Earth.
The Kuiper belt is a great ring of debris similar to the asteroid belt, but consisting mainly of objects composed primarily of ice. [195] It extends between 30 and 50 AU from the Sun. It is composed mainly of small Solar System bodies, although the largest few are probably large enough to be dwarf planets. [ 196 ]
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
On 31 January 2012, Eros passed Earth at 0.17867 AU (26,729,000 km; 16,608,000 mi), [26] [27] about 70 times the distance to the Moon, with a visual magnitude of +8.1. [28] During rare oppositions, every 81 years, such as in 1975 and 2056, Eros can reach a magnitude of +7.0, [ 7 ] which is brighter than Neptune and brighter than any main-belt ...
Earth is about to get a new neighbor in the form of an asteroid. But this one won't be making an impact. Instead, it'll be what space enthusiasts have dubbed a mini-moon, and it will stick around ...