Some Information On Our Asteroid Belt

Originally posted by poet1b


Considering this, I question how accurate the claim on how much matter there is in the asteroid belt.

edit on 26-5-2013 by poet1b because: typo

edit on 26-5-2013 by poet1b because: typo

As well as the source, like NASA... And what happened to the camera that your asteroid seemed to come directly at, without hitting or destroying? When the asteroid is closes to the "camera" you will notice different shading in the corners. I think your asteroid video shot is CGI.


As being an animated video it is not the original and a replica leaving the possibility for enhancement as an open idea

The generally accepted theory is that the asteroids in the asteroid belt formed right where you see them, but were unable to form into a planet because of Jupiter's influence on them.

However space itself is empty.

So the asteroids formed right there in the belt in the middle of space, but space is empty?

A) how can you create something from nothing or space?

B) what are asteroids doing with their own "orbit" or asteroid belt around the sun like a planet does?

Is it more likely to believe that a planet got destroyed by an asteroid like our planet gets hit with on a daily bases varying from different sizes, or that these asteroids just grew there out of nothing or space?

reply to post by whatzshaken


Unless I'm mistaken, the claim (or rather an estimate) is based on the mass of the asteroids we have discovered so far. But while new discoveries will keep coming, I doubt there will be more asteroids like Ceres or Vesta.

In the animated sequence of the asteroid, the camera isn't slamming straight into it. It was a flyby of the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. It's a sequence of images, so I don't understand how you can say that it's not the "original video". There was no video.

So the asteroids formed right there in the belt in the middle of space, but space is empty? A) how can you create something from nothing or space? B) what are asteroids doing with their own "orbit" or asteroid belt around the sun like a planet does? Is it more likely to believe that a planet got destroyed by an asteroid like our planet gets hit with on a daily bases varying from different sizes, or that these asteroids just grew there out of nothing or space?

So where did the planets come from? If you can answer that, then you can answer where asteroids came from, because asteroids are basically the building blocks of planets. The asteroids, in turn, formed out of the proto-planetary disc of gas and dust around the Sun. After most of the material accreted into planets, asteroids, and comets, the space between them became pretty empty. For your B) question, asteroids orbit the sun because of laws of gravity. If we chucked you into space at high enough speed to leave the Earth's orbit, you would orbit the sun just like the planets and asteroids do.

Finally, some general information from Wikipedia:

About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. These have mean diameters of more than 400 km, whereas Ceres, the asteroid belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident.

The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals, the smaller precursors of the planets, which in turn formed protoplanets. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from the giant planet imbued the protoplanets with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, and instead of fusing together, the planetesimals and most of the protoplanets shattered. As a result, 99.9% of the asteroid belt's original mass was lost in the first 100 millon years of the Solar System's history. Some fragments can eventually find their way into the inner Solar System, leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter.

reply to post by FreeThinkerIdealist


Very well thought out post, I thank you greatly for contributing to the thread. Star for you.

____________________________

@others in the thread:

The main thrust of my thread is to help dispel the notion that our asteroid belt is so thickly populated that anything traveling through it is at high risk of impacting something.

If we look at the asteroid belt it is highly populated, in respect to say the orbit of Earth, or the orbit of say Saturn. There are a lot more objects in the belt area that orbit the sun as compared to elsewhere.

What many people think of as densely populated, as seen from many posts here on ATS through the years, shows a misconception. That the asteroid belt is so densely populated that it looks like a busy street in a major city.

However, that isn't the case. It is densely populated in that there are many objects there. But the space they occupy is so large that they are very spread out.

Direct observation from both ground telescopes and later on with Hubble confirms this. Travel by robotic probes (Pioneer 10, 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, Dawn) all examples of flying through the asteroid belt with no problems at all.

Nice thread, thanks for posting it. S&F!

But Jupiter called....
They say it is their asteroid belt.

reply to post by whatzshaken


The asteroid belt has been studied by many since before the 1800's. A large majority of what we understand about it came from these studies. Not NASA.

The animated GIF of Ida was a flyby of the Galileo space craft on it's way to Jupiter. Galileo came within 2,390km of 243 Ida, an asteroid that is 53 km at it's widest. Not hard for a camera to zoom in at that distance.

As for "Space is empty, so how did they form?" question from you:

Space is indeed empty. However, things can be in space, like large molecular clouds that end up condensing and forming accretion disks that end up forming stars.......and other objects that end up orbiting it.

That matter is sucked up by both the star and the objects orbiting it such as planets, moons and yes, asteroids.

So no, the asteroids didn't end up created out of nothing (which I never said that they did). They formed out of the material that formed the rest of the solar system a very long time ago.

What are asteroids doing orbiting the sun like planets you ask?

They are doing exactly what anything that is made of matter will do: obey the laws of physics and gravitation.

Just because something is smaller in mass doesn't mean it get's a free pass and can ignore the laws of gravitation.

Originally posted by butcherguy
Nice thread, thanks for posting it. S&F!

But Jupiter called....
They say it is their asteroid belt.

LOL! Good one!

Actually if you go back to my OP and take a look at one of the pictures, you'll see that Jupiter has two groups of "groupies" that are in orbit with it.

Sort of like a rock band with a lot of fans!

Thank you for the insight , I never realized that these asteroids had these large distances from each other . And that the biggest one is 900 kilometers wide definitely a planet splitter if you ask me!

One day we probably would mine this sucker! Or build some out post on it.(hmm that reminds me of an early game I used to play) nevertheless great thread and gives me some really great creative thoughts of being there!!

Originally posted by poet1b
I think an important point to note is how much matter Earth absorbs from space on a continuous basis.

en.wikipedia.org...

Around 15,000 tonnes of meteoroids, micrometeoroids and different forms of space dust enter Earth's atmosphere each year.

Earth has been sweeping space for a couple of billion years, and we are still pulling that much matter from space.

Granted, our solar system is moving around the galaxy at an tremendous speed, and our galaxy is traveling through space at an even higher speed, so in essence, we never return to a space that we once occupied, but one would think all this space debris would be what is contained in our heliosphere. Maybe not? How much stuff is out there floating around between solar systems and between galaxies.

Considering this, I question how accurate the claim on how much matter there is in the asteroid belt.

edit on 26-5-2013 by poet1b because: typo

edit on 26-5-2013 by poet1b because: typo

Keep in mind that a lot of what we get hit with, is transplanted from far way, including past the asteroid belt.

Each month we enjoy a increase in shooting stars, known as meteor showers. Most (not all) of these showers are the debris fields left by cometary tails. Comet that originate from beyond the orbit of Neptune.

It's theorized that these long period comets come from the hypothetical Oort Cloud, bringing additional material into the inner solar system.

You can also get material from other planets and moons, when they are impacted by on object and have ejecta thrown into space.

Not everything that impacts with our planet must originate from the asteroid belt. We've even put enough junk up in orbit around the Earth to help with that amount of material that hits us (what goes up.....must come down).

While not all of the asteroid belt has been mapped, the largest of the 'roids that are out there have been found, and found a long time ago. Ceres being the largest found and a whopping 900km wide was discovered in 1801. It's so large it's actually considered a "Dwarf Planet" and not actually an asteroid Dawn will be there soon, and the images it sends back will give us the clearest view of it yet.

image of Ceres from Hubble


Vesta, discovered in 1804,

image of Vesta taken by Dawn:


Pallas, discovered in 1802,

image of Pallas taken by Hubble:


and Hygia discovered in 1849 are the largest objects located in the asteroid belt along with Ceres. All 4 of them combined make up over half the asteroid belt's mass.
Any other objects as big or bigger in the asteroid belt would have been spotted long ago.

I'm more concerned with objects like Eros as they are asteroids that leave the main belt area and are NEOs. Eros was discovered in 1898 and is over 34 km wide at it's widest point.

Originally posted by paradiselost333
I have seen very compelling evidence that there was a planet....that exploded!
Mars shows the scars from that event. Not here to argue but just to state there are allot of holes in the theory "well the most popular and excepted theory" you have put forth. I am an electric universe advocate which makes allot more sense than the current story< cause it is just a theory not fact. both theories that is..
EXPLODING PLANET and a great video on the subject..a must see
Thunderbolts of The Gods

edit on 26-5-2013 by paradiselost333 because: (no reason given)

I for one would definitely recommend the Thunderbolts of the Gods as an interesting read; personally I take it with a pinch of salt but it is still very interesting especially if you're into ancient esoteric mythology.

The asteroids are so spread out, that a space ship could travel through it, and the odds of hitting an asteroid are so low that you wouldn't really need any collision prevention actions.

thanks, erik, i also learned a great deal about the true nature of the 'belt' and its implications from your post.

you express yourself fairly well, though your writing (as with the vast majority's) would require editing in a more formal setting. anyway, not here to grammar naziize, but i will share one observation from the beginning of your fascinating post which will also convey some useful info on a couplr of common misconceptions:

the asteroid belt does not 'lay' between mars and jupiter; it does, however, 'lie' between them.

lay is a transitive verb, a fancy way of saying that it has an object, while lie (in the reclining sense) is intransitive, no object implied.

i lie in bed every morning 'til ten. i lay (past tense) there yesterday until the phone rang. i have lain (past participle) in bed sometimes 'til noon. lie, lay lain

he lays the newspaper on the table every morning. the hen laid two eggs in three days. we have laid the money aside every month for years now. lay (something somewhere), laid, laid (past and past participle the same)

i hope this little understood verbal distiction will also be useful to some throughout life.

again, thanks for informing us!

Very interesting thread OP. I'm waiting on my first telescope to arive and I soon plan to be studying what lurks above

You all will enjoy this gravity simultator www.nowykurier.com...

reply to post by ouvertaverite


Hey, he still writes better than a vast majority of our so-called professional media!

I have a couple of things to mention.
One is that Ida is technically not alone. It has a moonlet, called Dactyl...Which, if I recall, Art Bell Wanted to call Be-Sida..as in Beside Ida..LOL

Another thing is that it seems as if there used to be a collection of much larger bodies in the belt. I'm only guessing, but I'm basing it on the fact that a lot of these space boulders came from a differentiated body. Meaning that the original bodies had layers of material that went from heavy elements (like a core of nickel and Iron) to lighter ones, which contain progressively fewer amounts of metallic elements.

Originally posted by ouvertaverite
thanks, erik, i also learned a great deal about the true nature of the 'belt' and its implications from your post.

you express yourself fairly well, though your writing (as with the vast majority's) would require editing in a more formal setting. anyway, not here to grammar naziize, but i will share one observation from the beginning of your fascinating post which will also convey some useful info on a couplr of common misconceptions:

the asteroid belt does not 'lay' between mars and jupiter; it does, however, 'lie' between them.

lay is a transitive verb, a fancy way of saying that it has an object, while lie (in the reclining sense) is intransitive, no object implied.

i lie in bed every morning 'til ten. i lay (past tense) there yesterday until the phone rang. i have lain (past participle) in bed sometimes 'til noon. lie, lay lain

he lays the newspaper on the table every morning. the hen laid two eggs in three days. we have laid the money aside every month for years now. lay (something somewhere), laid, laid (past and past participle the same)

i hope this little understood verbal distiction will also be useful to some throughout life.

again, thanks for informing us!

Thanks for the grammar lesson.

Clear writing is important to ensure proper communication. However, grammar is not my forte and my 2nd ex-wife was an editor.

I try to use "your" in place of "you're" every once in a while to drive people up the wall.

reply to post by spacedoubt


There are actually Families and Groups of asteroids that tend to be close together. Many due to being a larger object that was impacted and broke apart.

One of the more famous ones is the Baptistina Family. It gained fame because of a hypothesis put out back in 2007, that the group had been a larger object that suffered an impact, and that pieces of those impacts hit both the Earth and the Moon, creating the KT extinction event of the dinosaurs and creating the crater Tycho on the moon.

However, in 2011 the WISE data showed that the impact event for Baptistian happened about 80 million years ago and not 160 million years ago as previously thought. This means not enough time for fragments to have been the KT impact event.
Also the chemical make up of Baptistian does not match the chemical make up of the meteor that hit the Earth 65 million years ago.

reply to post by eriktheawful


If a comet were to plow into an asteroid, there would be nothing left of either. Although a comet hasn't reached its maximum speed by that point, it is still sailing along at a fairly high rate of speed, and would hit at a sheer angle, essentially negating the velocity of the asteroid as a mitigating factor.

Originally posted by ThinkYouSpeak
Very interesting thread OP. I'm waiting on my first telescope to arive and I soon plan to be studying what lurks above

Actually you dont need a telescope for the bigger asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, etc...).
Binoculars will do fine.

In fact, under the right conditions, in a dark sky, with good eyes, you can see Vesta without any optical aid at all.

It is my opinion that the asteroid belt exists because Jupiter and Mars are its shepherd planets. (If you're familiar with Saturn's moons and rings then you would have heard the expression "the shepherd moon") The gravity of Jupiter and Mars serves to maintain the belt; any asteroids that get too far from it would either be ejected or would impact those planets.

Originally posted by alfa1

Originally posted by paradiselost333
I have seen very compelling evidence that there was a planet....that exploded!

If it was a planet, then where did it all go?

The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 2.8×1021 to 3.2×1021 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.

outwards..allot hit mars that is why the northern region looks untouched, that 4% figure is not a fact its an estimate. but that said the rest of it was ejected to become asteroids ,comets,etc I would guess allot was vaporizes also , that is all speculation though. and before you say it ,no comets are not dirty snowballs lol that is ridiculous they look just like asteroids. and deep impact proved that also the stardust mission where they found very little water and made up some lame excuses.>source

reply to post by eriktheawful


do you really have to impact the asteroid to perturb its orbit of the sun?