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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]
10 Hygiea is a major asteroid located in the main asteroid belt.With a mean diameter of between 425 and 440 km and a mass estimated to be 3% of the total mass of the belt, [11] it is the fourth-largest asteroid in the Solar System by both volume and mass, and is the largest of the C-type asteroids (dark asteroids with a carbonaceous surface) in classifications that use G type for 1 Ceres.
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 ...
Fomalhaut asteroid belt is far more complex than researchers had realised
Vesta orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, within the asteroid belt, with a period of 3.6 Earth years, [6] specifically in the inner asteroid belt, interior to the Kirkwood gap at 2.50 AU. Its orbit is moderately inclined ( i = 7.1°, compared to 7° for Mercury and 17° for Pluto ) and moderately eccentric ( e = 0.09, about the same as for ...
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 asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System. About 60% of the main belt mass is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 3% that of the Moon