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These lists contain the Sun, the planets, dwarf planets, many of the larger small Solar System bodies (which includes the asteroids), all named natural satellites, and a number of smaller objects of historical or scientific interest, such as comets and near-Earth objects.
As space objects go, comets and meteors are not very big. While a planet like Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter and a star like our Sun is about 865,000 miles across, the largest asteroid ...
Very few asteroids with a diameter larger than 100 meters have a rotation period less than 2.2 hours. [86] For asteroids rotating faster than approximately this rate, the inertial force at the surface is greater than the gravitational force, so any loose surface material would be flung out.
The number of asteroids brighter than H = 25, which corresponds to about 40 m (130 ft) in diameter, is estimated at 840,000 ± 23,000 —of which about 1.3 percent had been discovered by February 2016; the number of asteroids brighter than H = 30 (larger than 3.5 m (11 ft)) is estimated at 400 ± 100 million—of which about 0.003 percent had ...
Our solar system is full of floating space debris: Comets, meteors, asteroids and more. What are the differences that make up these various space rocks?
Although the solid nucleus of comets is generally less than 60 kilometers (37 mi) across, the coma may be thousands or millions of kilometers across, sometimes becoming larger than the Sun. [52] For example, about a month after an outburst in October 2007, comet 17P/Holmes briefly had a tenuous dust atmosphere larger than the Sun. [53] The ...
The following asteroids can all reach an apparent magnitude brighter than or equal to the +8.3 attained by Saturn's moon Titan at its brightest, which was discovered 145 years before the first asteroid was found owing to its closeness to the easily observed Saturn.
Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. [2] [3] [4] Many are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars. [5] [6] [7] A meteor or shooting star [8] is the visible passage of a meteoroid, comet, or asteroid entering Earth's ...