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The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oort cloud objects. About 60% of the main belt mass is contained in the four ...
When found, asteroids were seen as a class of objects distinct from comets, and there was no unified term for the two until small Solar System body was coined in 2006. The main difference between an asteroid and a comet is that a comet shows a coma due to sublimation of near-surface ices by solar radiation. A few objects have ended up being ...
The following is a collection of lists of asteroids of the Solar System that are exceptional in some way, such as their size or orbit. For the purposes of this article, "asteroid" refers to minor planets out to the orbit of Neptune , and includes the dwarf planet 1 Ceres , the Jupiter trojans and the centaurs , but not trans-Neptunian objects ...
Asteroids, which are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system, are also of interest because capturing details about their size, orbit and composition can reveal insights about our ...
720,000 km/h (450,000 mi/h) [10] Orbital period. ~230 million years [10] The Solar System [d] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [11] It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
Currently most of the objects of mass between 10 9 kg to 10 12 kg (less than 1000 teragrams (Tg)) listed here are near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). The Aten asteroid 1994 WR12 has less mass than the Great Pyramid of Giza, 5.9 × 10 9 kg. For more about very small objects in the Solar System, see meteoroid, micrometeoroid, cosmic dust, and ...
The Jupiter trojans, commonly called trojan asteroids or simply trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter 's orbit around the Sun. Relative to Jupiter, each trojan librates around one of Jupiter's stable Lagrange points: either L4, existing 60° ahead of the planet in its orbit, or L5, 60° behind.
The Solar System belts were formed in the formation and evolution of the Solar System. The Grand tack hypothesis is a model of the unique placement of the giant planets and the Solar System belts. Most giant planets found outside our Solar System, exoplanets, are inside the snow line, and are called Hot Jupiters.