How Asteroid Belts Work
Posted by staff / January 18, 2011
Asteroid belts aren’t quite the dense fields of gigantic spinning rocks that you may have seen in a “Star Wars” film, but they’re still fascinating. In fact, the main asteroid belt may tell us how our entire solar system came into existence.
How did the asteroid belt form, and how did it affect the rest of the solar system? What do Mars and Jupiter have to do with it, and how do their orbits affect the main belt? What about the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud — are they any different from the main one? Are there other asteroid belts in other solar systems like ours, or is the main belt unique? Keep reading to find out.
Full article at HowStuffWorks.com.
Photo credit: Fotolia
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