The Solar System is a much more complex structure than a simple star with planets orbiting it. It is a bubble where different elements coexist in addition to the Sun and the eight major planets, among which is the asteroid belt, a circumstellar disk where the main debris of the Solar System is groupedincluding some dwarf planets such as Ceres and Pallas.
Asteroid belt
Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, there is a circumstellar disk that, like the planets, is trapped in the gravitational field of the massive Sun. The asteroid belt is full of rocky and some other metallic bodies that also revolve around the host star. Of the solar system.
The term ” comes from the Greek ‘aster’ which means ‘star’ and ‘eidos’ which translates as ‘appearance’, therefore it refers to a body that looks like a star without being one. They received this name because astronomers first discovered them in the early 19th century and thought they were stars. However, their peculiar movement made them understand that they were much closer to us.
In the 1850s, a plethora of asteroids that until then were considered minor began to be discovered. But from here, astronomers understood that they were making a nomenclature error; These were not planets but asteroids. It was in that same decade when the term asteroid belt arose and it was discovered that it was a disk that It orbits the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Although it is usually thought that the belt is a region densely packed with rocky objects, the reality is that although millions of asteroids live there, most are well distanced and rarely between them. The average distance between each of the belts is approximately 1 million kilometers and collision rates are one in a hundred thousand years.
How big is the asteroid belt?
He asteroid belt is located between 2.2 and 3.2 astronomical units from our Sun, one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Therefore, the disk It is 329 million kilometers from the Sun and has a width of about 150 million kilometers.
The variety of asteroids is very great, some are made up of rocks or minerals while others have a metallic composition. Most of them are thought to be just the size of a pebble, but there are also 1 to 2 million asteroids more than a kilometer wide.
The largest of all asteroids is the one called Ceres, discovered in 1801 by astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi and currently renamed a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union. Ceres is the largest body in this region and has a size of 952.4 kilometers in diameter. It is another of the so-called dwarf planets, which is rather an asteroid that orbits in the belt and has a size of 570 kilometers in diameter.
How the asteroid belt formed
Previously, astronomers believed that the disk was made up of the reminiscences of a planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter, and that for some reason ended up reduced to rubble. However, today theories point the other way.
It is believed that the belt is made up of debris from the birth of the Solar System and although there are remains of collisions in it, most of its rocks are reminiscent of the planetesimal disk that formed around the Sun, in the most primitive times of our system.