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Between tiny Mars and humongous Jupiter, lies a band of objects known as Asteroid Belt. This belt of ‘minor planets’ was supposed to be a planet but Jupiter’s gravity didn’t let that happen. So, it ended up as Sun‘s own ring system made up of asteroids and a dwarf planet.
Here are some interesting facts about the Asteroid Belt:
The Asteroid Belt is also termed the ‘Main Asteroid Belt’ or ‘Main Belt’ to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and Trojan Asteroids
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Collisions became too violent and instead of fusing together, the Planetesimals and most of the Protoplanets shattered and formed the Asteroid Belt
Appendix: Accrete, Primordial
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Computer simulations suggest that the original Asteroid Belt may have contained the mass equivalent to the Earth
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Although some scientists refer to the asteroids as residual Planetesimals, other scientists consider them distinct
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The main or core population of the Asteroid Belt is sometimes divided into three zones:
Zone I: 2.06 AU to 2.5 AU
Zone II: 2.5 AU to 2.82 AU
Zone III: 2.82 AU to 3.28 AU
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The mass is also equal to 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Pluto’s moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km)
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A formal Minor Planet designation is (For example 4 Vesta), a number–name combination given to a Minor Planet. Among the nearly half a million minor planets that received a number, only about 20 thousand (or 4%) have received a name. In addition, more than 200,000 minor planets have not even been numbered. An asteroid is a type of ‘Minor Planet’
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New objects were found in the Asteroid Belt at an accelerating rate. Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list
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The apparent magnitudes of most of the known asteroids are between 11 and 19, with the median at about 16. The extreme naked-eye limit in the darkest skies available on Earth is between +7 to +8 which means any astronomical object above this range can’t be visible to naked eye. This is why we can’t see asteroid belt from the Earth without a telescope
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C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid is the most common variety, forming around 75% of known asteroids. 17% of asteroids are S-type. Some, but not all M-type asteroids, are made of nickel-iron, either pure or mixed with small amounts of stone
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7472 Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY are the only V-type asteroids discovered in the outer asteroid belt to date
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The asteroids within an asteroid family share similar orbital elements, such as Semi-major axis, Eccentricity, and orbital inclination as well as similar spectral features, all of which indicate a common origin in the breakup of a larger body
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According to some models, there was insufficient outgassing of water during the Earth’s formative period to form the oceans, requiring an external source such as a cometary bombardment
Appendix: Planetesimals
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Due to the low density of materials within the asteroid belt, the odds of a probe running into an asteroid are now estimated at less than 1 in 1 billion, unless specifically targeted
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Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 and Ulysses passed through the belt without imaging any asteroids
Galileo imaged 951 Gaspra in 1991 and 243 Ida in 1993, NEAR imaged 253 Mathilde in 1997 and landed on 433 Eros in February 2001
Cassini imaged 2685 Masursky in 2000, Stardust imaged 5535 Annefrank in 2002
New Horizons imaged 132524 APL in 2006, Rosetta imaged 2867 Šteins in September 2008 and 21 Lutetia in July 2010
Dawn orbited Vesta between July 2011 and September 2012 and has orbited Ceres since March 2015
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Source: Wikipedia
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