ASTEROIDS
The small rocky inner
planets, from Mercury to Mars, lie quite close together in space. From Mars to Jupiter there is quite a gap where we might expect to find another planet but instead we find a swarm of much smaller bodies. We call them
ASTEROIDS or minor Planets.
The discovery of things in the heavens often comes about much like the solving of a mystery. his is the way the asteroids were
discovered. Two men, Titius and Bode, had at different times figured out that there must be a planet between Mars and Jupiter here was such a large n the distance between them. So several astronomers set about searching for this planet.
In 1801, a planet was actually found there. It was named Ceres, but it was a very
tiny planet indeed, with a
diameter of only 480
miles. So it was believed that it could be only one of a groupf small planets and the search went on
In time ,three more tiny planets were found, the brightest of which was only half the size of Ceres. Astronomers decided that a larger
Planet must have exploded and left these four tiny pieces. But after 15 years of searching, another astronomer found still another tiny planet and this started the hunt again.
By 1890,300 small planets had been found, and between 1890 and 1927, 2,000 had been discovered! These tiny planets, all rotating around the sun in the area between Mars and Jupiter, are called asteroids.
To indicate how small they are ,195 of them have diameter of more than 61 miles;502, between 25 and 61 miles;193, between 10 and 25 miles; and 22 of them have diameter ofless than 10 miles!
If the mass of all the asteroids were added together, it would only be 1/3000 of that of the earth. So even if all the asteroids were united, they would form an insignificant planet.
As to how the asteroids were formed, the theory is that a satellite of Jupiter exploded and created these fragments.
More abstracts about the TELL ME WHY