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marilyng00: 11 months ago via iPhone

What is an asteroid belt?

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Answer 1

tupelo916: 11 months ago

Don't listen to them, it's a good question! And astronomy is fascinating, I've copied a Wikipedia on it but if you're really interested go to NASA (the best website ever) here's the wiki version

The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The asteroid belt is also termed the main asteroid belt or main belt because there are other asteroids in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea. These have mean diameters of more than 400 km, while Ceres, the asteroid belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter.[1][2][3][4] The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, and these can form an asteroid family whose members have similar orbital characteristics and compositions. Collisions also produce a fine dust that forms a major component of the zodiacal light. Individual asteroids within the asteroid belt are categorized by their spectra, with most falling into three basic groups: carbonaceous (C-type), silicate (S-type), and metal-rich (M-type).
The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals, the smaller precursors of the planets, which in turn formed protoplanets. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from the giant planet imbued the protoplanets with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, and instead of fusing together, the planetesimals and most of the protoplanets shattered. As a result, most of the asteroid belt's mass has been lost since the formation of the Solar System. Some fragments can eventually find their way into the inner Solar System, leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter. At these orbital distances, a Kirkwood gap occurs as they are swept into other orbits.
Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions include the centaurs, Kuiper belt and scattered disk objects, and Oort cloud comets.

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Looooooop: 11 months ago

Wow, that's a long answer...:)

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tupelo916: 10 months ago

Sorry:p I love all that stuff though and it's cool to see someone else that's interested in it too:)

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Answer 2

BrizzySmiley: 11 months ago

really?

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Answer 3

dummied123: 11 months ago

you wear it around your waist (sarcastic remark)

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Answer 4

Looooooop: 11 months ago

Cmon, we learned that in like the 1st grade!!

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marilyng00: 10 months ago via iPhone

Who asked u

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Looooooop: 10 months ago

Sorry I didn't mean it like that...:(

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