Category Ask the Psychologist

There’s gold (and other precious metals) in those rocks! In fact, a company called Planetary Resources plans to send robot miners to the asteroid belt.

The asteroid belt probably contains millions of asteroids. Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet, or of the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago. The asteroids in the asteroid belt come in a variety of sizes. Some are very small (less than a mile across), while others are quite large. The largest asteroid is called Ceres. It is about one-quarter the size of our moon. It is a dwarf planet.

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Asteroids are roving rocks found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A Meteor also known as shooting stars, meteors are places of rocks or ice that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. As much as 22,000,000 pounds (10,000,000 kg) of meteors burn harmlessly in the atmosphere each day.

Any piece of space debris that survives the fiery entry into Earth’s atmosphere is known as a meteorite once it touches down.

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Although movies portray asteroid belts as spaceship-smashing jumbles of rock, our solar system’s real asteroid belt isn’t nearly so treacherous. The average distance between rocks is nearly a million miles (1.6 million km), which would give spaceship pilots plenty of wiggle room.

It’s estimated that our asteroid belt once contained about 1000 times the mass it currently contains. However, within about one million years of its formation, it was down to somewhere in the vicinity of the stabilized amount we see today. Once this system was stabilized with almost no collisions, the asteroids simply travel in their respective orbits with the field itself neither increasing nor decreasing in mass significantly since that initial stabilization period.

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Nobody knows, but don’t lose any sleep over the thought of a space rock landing in your living room. Several monitoring projects – such as Spacewatch and the Minor Planet Center – use powerful telescopes to scan the skies and track the courses of any “near-Earth objects,” including asteroids that might drift too close to home. NASA has identified 90 percent of all the near-Earth objects large enough to cause catastrophic damage if they stuck our planet. So far, we’re in the clear.

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Because they’ve smashed into every planet in the solar system, including Earth, and one good hit could mean game over for life here. Asteroids travel at tens of thousands of miles an hour – speeds that transfer into destructive energy when they collide with a planet, moon, or each other. An asteroid 450 feet (137 m) across could destroy an entire city. More than a thousand people were injured in 2013 when an asteroid just 62 feet (19 m) wide exploded high in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. An asteroid impact 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs.

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Stephen Hawking is famous for shedding light on black holes in 1960s through today in England. Considered the most brilliant scientific mind since Einstein, Stephen Hawking is famous for trying to reverse engineer the workings of the universe through quantum physics – or the study of the universe at its teeniest-weeniest level. He’s also an expert on black holes and their bizarre behavior. Based on his observations, Hawking believes that just as the universe began in a cosmic big bang; it will someday end up collapsing into black holes.

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