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This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System. [ 1 ] The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System.
Also includes the asteroid belt (the white donut-shaped cloud), the Hildas (the orange "triangle" just inside the orbit of Jupiter), the Jupiter trojans (green), and the near-Earth asteroids. The group that leads Jupiter are called the "Greeks" and the trailing group are called the "Trojans" (Murray and Dermott, Solar System Dynamics, pg. 107)
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 ]
Image of the main asteroid belt and the Trojan asteroids. The asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter. It is made of thousands of rocky planetesimals from 1,000 kilometres (621 mi) to a few meters across. These are thought to be debris of the formation of the Solar System that could not form a planet due to Jupiter's gravity.
Collisions in the main asteroid belt send rocky fragments flying haphazardly through space, with some of those eventually striking Earth. "While more than 70,000 meteorites are known, only 6% had ...
At a diameter of 964 km, Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt and comprises about one-third of the belt's total mass. Ceres possesses sufficient gravity to form a rounded, ellipsoid shape, suggesting that it is close to being in hydrostatic equilibrium [ 6 ] —one of the conditions for defining a dwarf planet according to the ...
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Most highly inclined known main-belt asteroid from August 17, 1998, to October 19, 1998 MPC (88043) 2000 UE 110: 51.998° October 29, 2000 First main-belt asteroid discovered and numbered to have an inclination greater than 50°. MPC (138925) 2001 AU 43: 72.132° January 4, 2001 A Mars-crosser and near-Earth object. MPC (127546) 2002 XU 93: 77 ...