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Asked by timmy to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 14 Nov 2014.
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Lydia Bach answered on 14 Nov 2014:
Hey Timmy,
asteroids are small-ish rocky bodies in orbit around the sun. Most of them are found in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
We have systems in place that should help us discovering if an asteroid crosses the Earth’s path, but that rarely happens. Mind you an asteroid of a size of only quarter-mile could cause a global disaster, so better keep looking!
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Ciarán O'Brien answered on 14 Nov 2014:
They’re often the remains of a planet that didn’t make it, while the planets we know today formed out of big loops and clouds of gas and dust condensing into a spherical shape, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was probably going to be a planet but something went wrong. Maybe there wasn’t enough dust and gas to hold together under its own gravity. Maybe there was enough for TWO planets to form in the same orbit but they smashed into each other, spreading tiny shards of each other into the asteroid belt. Maybe it was something else.
Most of them are tiny, from the size of little flecks of dust to the size of your fist, or maybe your head. A few of them are really big, like the one scientists called Ceres, which is nearly 1,000 Km across. But the big ones are very rare; Ceres alone is about one third of all the material in the asteroid belt.
They’re mostly made of rock and some ice, and maybe a few metals. If we ever get to space properly, it could be well worth our while mining them for metal, as they’d be a lot easier to drill through.
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