Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is a rotating
stellar disk located in the region between the planets Mars and Jupiter, and in
this region revolves a huge amount of small asteroids that are composed mainly
of rocks and some metals.
The asteroid belt has been described as the main
asteroid belt to distinguish it from the other group of asteroids that exist in
the solar system, which are the near-Earth objects and the Trojan group.
It is a belt of asteroids and asteroids are a group of
very small planets that cannot be seen with the naked eye without a telescope,
and scientists did not know of their existence until the year (1801 AD), as the
different planets revolve around the sun in fixed elliptical orbits, the closest
of which is the planet Mercury and the farthest is the planet Neptune, and as
soon as scientists began to know more about the movements of the planets around
the sun, they noticed that each planet is between one and a quarter times, to
twice the distance of the previous planet from the sun, then they noticed that
this is not true for Mars and Jupiter, as Mars is about 228 million kilometers
away from the sun, and on this basis Jupiter should be 402 million kilometers
from the sun, but in fact it is located at twice this distance, which suggests
the presence of another planet orbiting in this space between Mars and Jupiter.
Four large asteroids occupy half the mass of this belt. The total mass of the
asteroid belt constitutes about 4% of the mass of the moon.