The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. Ceres is the only object in the asteroid belt large enough to be a dwarf planet.
About Asteroid belt in brief
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. Ceres, the only object in the asteroid belt large enough to be a dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter. On January 1, Giuseppe Piazzi, chair of astronomy at the University of Palermo, Sicily, found a tiny moving object in an orbit with exactly the pattern predicted by the Titius-Bode Law. The finding was unexpected because comets, not asteroids, are typically considered tosprout jets and plumes, says Piazzo. The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals. Some fragments eventually found their way into the inner Solar System,. leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. In 1596, Johannes Kepler predicted “Between Mars and Jupiter, I place a planet” in his Mysterium Cosmographicum. While analyzing Tycho Brahe’s data, Kepler thought that there was too large a gap between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. In 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1801, leading astronomers to conclude that there had to be another planet between the planets. Unlike the other known planets, Ceres and Pallas remained in the same region even after the discovery of the other planets, even though their orbits remained at the same points of the semi-major axes of all the planets of the time.
Fifteen months later, Heinrich Olbers discovered a second object in this region, even if it was not a planet, but its lack of a coma suggested it was a comet. The discovery was made by using the far-infrared abilities of the Herschel Space Observatory. On 22 January 2014, ESA scientists reported the detection, for the first definitive time, of water vapor on Ceres. According to one of the scientists, “The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids’”. According to another scientist, ‘the lines are getting blurrier and blurrier,’ he says. ‘‘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.’ The total mass of this asteroid belt, or main belt, is approximately 4% that of the Moon. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. Most falling into three basic groups: carbonaceous, silicate, and metal-rich. The Oort cloud objects are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, and the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oortcloud cloud objects.
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This page is based on the article Asteroid belt published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
