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A modern hypothesis for the asteroid belt's creation relates to how, in general for 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 disc of material that then ...
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 asteroid belt contains tens of thousands, possibly millions, of objects over one kilometer in diameter. [141] Despite this, the total mass of the asteroid belt is unlikely to be more than a thousandth of that of Earth. [40] The asteroid belt is very sparsely populated; spacecraft routinely pass through without incident. [142]
The largest irregular moon is Neptune's moon Triton, which is thought to be a captured Kuiper belt object. [83] Moons of solid Solar System bodies have been created by both collisions and capture. Mars's two small moons, Deimos and Phobos, are thought to be captured asteroids. [93]
Asteroids number in the hundreds of thousands. For longer lists, see list of exceptional asteroids, list of asteroids, or list of Solar System objects by size. Asteroid moons; A number of smaller groups distinct from the asteroid belt; The outer Solar System with the giant planets, their satellites, trojan asteroids and some minor planets. Jupiter
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.
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 ...
A small asteroid will be pulled into orbit around the Earth as a “mini-moon” later this month before the space rock departs into other parts of the solar system. The 10m-wide asteroid, dubbed ...