AST-1A Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Tv Dinner, Sulfur, Terminal Velocity
Document Summary
Goal: to know about asteroids and their relations to us. In the early 1800s astronomers started noticing that there were starts that would move from night to night with respects to the background starts. These objects were far from too din (and therefore too small) to be planets. The largest asteroid is < 1/3 the diameter. There are millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt down to the size of about 1 km. The asteroid belt exists because that is a region where the gravitational influences from. Jupiter would not allow a full planet to form (in fact jupiter caused mars to be so small for the same reason) This is a debris field left over from the formation of the solar system. As expected, asteroids are made of the same stuff as the entire earth (well, what the earth would be made of if the heavier stuff didn"t sink into the core)
