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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.
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.
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 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]
Another 8% of the Earth meteorites can be traced to the Flora and Nysa asteroid families in the main asteroid belt, the research found. And about 6% of the meteorites can be traced to Vesta, it ...
The outer edge of the terrestrial region, between 2 and 4 AU from the Sun, is called the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt initially contained more than enough matter to form 2–3 Earth-like planets, and, indeed, a large number of planetesimals formed there.
Didymos probably formed in our solar system's main asteroid belt, between the planets Mars and Jupiter, and then was knocked into the inner solar system, the researchers said.
The impactor likely formed in the outer solar system before migrating to the asteroid belt. A team of researchers think they know the origin of a massive space rock that hit Earth and killed off ...